The history of the animated feature film does not begin, as most people tend to think and the Disney corporation tries to imply, with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937. Rather, it begins 20 years earlier, with Argentine filmmaker Quirino Cristiani’s satire El apóstol, a film lost after all known copies were destroyed […]
Well, here’s what I surely didn’t expect: that a remake produced by the insipid Michael Bay in 2003 and starring a TV teen starlet would end up being the second-best film with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in its title. No, it cannot hold a candle to Tobe Hooper’s original, but it’s not a godawful comedy, […]
I have seen the future of cinema, and it is a bug-eyed, box-shaped robot. That’s not meant to be a pun about how Pixar’s miraculous ninth feature, WALL·E, is set in the year 2800. Though I’ve certainly made worse puns. No, what I mean is that WALL·E the movie and WALL·E, the obscenely cute star […]
Get Smart the movie is absolutely not Get Smart the TV show, and if we are going to judge Get Smart the movie based solely on how it compares to its illustrious forebear, well it’s obviously going to be a flat-out disaster. Mel Brooks and Buck Henry’s groundbreaking sitcom remains one of the funniest programs […]
Do you like dick jokes? Do you really like dick jokes? Then boy, does Mike Myers have a movie for you. I don’t mean to say that there’s anything wrong with dick jokes. Fact is, I’ve enjoyed a dick joke in my day. But there are dick jokes and then there are good dick jokes, […]
The films of John Cassavetes have quite a bit in common, thematically and aesthetically, with one of the most famous and most obvious being the function of actors in his style. In a Cassavetes picture, performance isn’t necessarily important because of how it reveals character, but because of how it reveals the process of performing: […]
Strap in kids, because the story of how Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation came to exist, and why it was released by yet a fourth studio, is a long and sometimes confusing one; and it is almost certainly more dramatically compelling than the actual content of the movie involved. In the chaotic fallout that […]
We’re accustomed to saying that a “contrived” story is necessarily unsatisfying, but Fatih Akin’s fascinating and brilliant The Edge of Heaven puts that notion to the test: the movie presents a tangled network connecting six people that could hardly be more contrived, and to add insult to injury, most of those contrivances don’t end up […]
Julianne Moore is bullet-proof. No matter how many terrible films she makes – and it’s been quite a few, at this point – no-one would ever even think of suggesting that her career is drying up, or that the actress herself might not actually be worth watching anymore. This is for the extremely good reason […]
First, a small thought piece: why art? One of the main reasons that we have narrative – certainly not the only one, but a big one – is to create an environment where we as a society can confront our anxieties. You see this in the common idea that all art reflects the culture in […]
On behalf of all those who bitched about Hulk back in 2003, I’d like to apologise to Ang Lee. His one and only foray into the comic book movie was undeniably flawed, but it had a surfeit of ambition, maybe even too much – not a sin that the subgenre commits all that often. Ambition […]
L’enfance croit ce qu’on lui raconte et ne le met pas en doute. Elle croit qu’une rose qu’on cueille peut attirer des drames dans une famille. Elle croit que les mans d’une bête humaine qui tue se mettent à fumer et que cette bê on a honte lorsqu’une jeune fille habite sa maison. Elle croit […]
