Having seen only his 2006 gangster-western Exiled hardly makes me anything like a specialist on director Johnnie To, but even with that limited knowledge it’s hard not to see what makes that film like his newest, Sparrow. Both films are, on paper, rough-and-tumble crime pictures about the travails affecting a group of friends who get […]
By the time that Dracula Has Risen from the Grave was released in 1968, the Hammer horror film was already looking a tad musty; and that watershed year only strengthened the impression that there was something fundamentally old-fashioned about the studio’s moody Gothic pictures in the age of Night of the Living Dead. That didn’t […]
Oliver Stone is quite possibly an insane man, but none of his movies have led me to think him an idiot – but what possible explanation for W. could there otherwise be? Released 94 days before George W. Bush’s last day as President of the United States, it would have made sense for the notable […]
When I am dictator of the world, one of the first laws I shall pass will make it illegal for movie studios to keep giving money to filmmakers whose reputation is based solely on the masterpieces they made 20+ years ago. Though this is not a flawless plan (it would have deprived the world of […]
It may be shamelessly derivative of countless other horror films, it may be the latest in a long run of American remakes of foreign movies deserving of a proper release, and it may be suspiciously timed to feel like nothing but a mercenary knock-off of Cloverfield, but this much about Quarantine certainly shocked me: it […]
The curious career of Jonathan Demme has gone from a tawdry women-in-prison thriller for producer Roger Corman to quirky, warm-hearted comedies; from the definitive New Wave concert film to an Oscar-winning prestige drama (to say nothing of that Oscar-winning serial killer picture); from left-wing documentaries to big-budget Hollywood remakes. Damned if I can figure out […]
Despite being named for the street where Paris’s most important police station is located (imagine titling a film Scotland Yard), despite a plot jammed full of intrigue and twists, and despite being written and directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, a French filmmaker noted for his exceptionally taut movies, Quai des Orfèvres is actually a pretty lousy […]
Though it’s a perfectly fine vampire film, I’d have to admit if pressed that 1968’s Dracula Has Risen from the Grave is the moment when the first subtle hints of badness struck Hammer’s Dracula franchise, hints that would blossom into full-on wretchedness in just a few years’ time. None of the three prior films were […]
The 1960s saw Hammer Film Productions at the height of its popularity and, arguably, its creativity. Which perhaps goes to explain the strange six-year gap in the flagship Frankenstein and Dracula franchises, as the studio’s filmmakers saw fit to explore other avenues in the horror genre, as well as occasional forays into things like pirate […]
We nonbelievers have a noted tendency to attack each other for any number of things: being too vocal, being too timid, being vocal in the wrong way, the “No True Atheist” fallacy et cetera (my notion has always been that a group of people united only in the philosophical belief that you should not blithely […]
LIES! DAMNABLE, CONTEMPTIBLE LIES! Despite the most promisingly awful trailer in, perhaps, history, Walt Disney Pictures’ Beverly Hills Chihuahua is most certainly not an all-singing all-dancing musical revue full of hideous CGI dogs. Instead, it’s a crypto-racist do-over of The Incredible Journey. Full of hideous CGI dogs. I do not hesitate to admit that, at […]
In an introduction to Dekalog, Stanley Kubrick once wrote of the great Krzysztof Kieśloswki and his writing partner, Krzysztof Piesiwicz, “[T]hey have the very rare ability to dramatize their ideas rather than just talking about them. By making their points through the dramatic action of the story they gain the added power of allowing the […]
