If Mario Bava’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much can be identified as the first giallo, it’s mostly because of hindsight: it is ground zero for the form, the earliest ending point for most of the tropes that came to define the subgenre. But at the same time, it’s notable as much for the ways […]
The wave has broken and rolled back, finally: Up is the first film by Pixar studios in three years that does not fundamentally redefine what animated cinema is capable of achieving in the hands of modern filmmaking’s greatest collection of geniuses. It is merely an example of what modern filmmaking’s greatest collection of geniuses are […]
Writer-director Rian Johnson’s 2005 debut feature Brick was a marvelous genre experiment, inserting the language, plot and mentality of hard-boiled detective fiction almost unchanged into a high school setting. The film was a wholly successful mash-up, with both sides of the equation seeming all the fresher for the wild new context, and the film, it’s […]
Warning: though the following review is written about a family-friendly movie, some of the language found herein is very naughty indeed. Please click the “back” button, impressionable young readers! As far as I’m aware, nobody is actually all that fond of Night at the Museum, a film that rather unnecessarily made over $250 million upon […]
When a young, cash-strapped filmmaker named James Cameron started writing a screenplay about a diner waitress being chased by a murderous cyborg from the future, he probably didn’t expect to be launching a durable tent-pole franchise that would last (so far) 25 years past that first movie’s debut. But when Terminator, although this is the […]
The story of an inspirational teacher who causes his (or very seldom, her) charges to understand something new and empowering about the world, is as hoary as any old chestnut out there, and probably for a simple reason: most people who write movies went to school at some point and very likely had a teacher […]
At the risk of repeating myself, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho changed everything. Everything. American movies had been inching towards more violence, more sex, more “grown-up” material, if that’s the word for it, for quite a while; but Hitch is the one who gave the whole industry a firm shove off the cliff, back in 1960. Now, […]
We all know by now that the career of filmmaker Steven Soderbergh breaks into two separate parts: greatly accomplished studio fare that is extremely entertaining, awards-friendly, or both; and the… other ones. Say whatever you like about the other ones, but it is an undeniable fact that they are not thoughtless things – it may […]
Holy hell, it’s an independent comedy about a sweetly damaged man who falls in love with a prickly woman with a heart of gold, and proceed to show his love for her in the quirkiest ways possible, which is meant to be all super-cute except that it shades into stalking, and even if it didn’t […]
The venerable, awards-laden Broadway musical A Chorus Line was already adapted into a famously terrible film by Richard Attenborough in 1985; we’ve had to wait for the recent documentary Every Little Step by James D. Stern and Adam Del Deo to get a cinematic treatment of the material that actually gets to the heart of […]
The Coens, the Dardennes, the Quays. Filmmaker brothers tend to come in matched sets, working together at all times. Yet it is eminently clear in Carlos Cuarón’s debut feature as a director that he is not receiving any tips or aid from his famous sibling Alfonso, although that man did serve as his producer; and […]
In 1934, the spectacularly gifted Austrian filmmaker Fritz Lang became one of a great many European filmmakers to emigrate to the United States, hoping to avoid a, shall we say, politically sensitive climate growing in Germany at the time. A Catholic with Jewish heritage from his mother’s side of the family, Lang wasn’t necessarily all […]
