The “evil psycho kid” subgenre of horror movies is, at all times, a delicate thing to navigate without falling into the worst kinds of exploitative traps. Not because of the subject matter per se – I’m not enough of a prude that the very notion of a child murdering people with crazed glee is a […]
A recurring theme in our year-long review of the cinema culture of 1939 has been the awareness of filmmakers in those days of the coming war, almost like people in that year could predict the coming change in the whole structure of the western world that would result. In the English-language movies we’ve looked at […]
One of the dangers I have learned about with reviewing franchises, is that when you are too rough on the original it leaves very little room to maneuver if the sequel is worse, and God help you if there’s a third film. Trying to apply the same rules when I’ve already messed up the first […]
Armando Iannucci’s In the Loop is an unbearably funny movie about a subject that isn’t by itself funny at all: an act of deliberate collusion between factions within the American and British governments to trump up unsubstantiated evidence from dubious intelligence to drive both of those countries into a meritless war in the Middle East. […]
François Truffaut once famously suggested that there could never be a truly anti-war film, because film by its nature makes whatever it is depicting seem exciting. This generally sound theory has been violated since he first voiced it (and really, already had been before that; has anyone ever walked out of Grand Illusion thinking to […]
Italian politics are tremendously confusing. This is the first lesson I took away from Paolo Sorrentino’s Il Divo, winner of the 2008 Jury Prize at Cannes. It is a marvelous and inventive and fun motion picture through and through, but none of this changes the fact that it’s fairly merciless: if you don’t understand the […]
The wild success of Scream had two primary reverberations: first, and most famously, it led to a resurgence of the slasher formula and to teen horror more generally; second, it made writer Kevin Williamson one of the hottest creators in Hollywood, for a little while anyway. Largely, these two trends continued hand in hand, as […]
Full disclosure: I am extremely jealous of (500) Days of Summer. It is the first film of 2009 that I would give anything to have made it myself. But alas I did not, and so I have to be contented that first-time writers Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, and music video director Marc Webb […]
There’s a common observation that the Alien franchise is something of a director’s showcase: take one lead character, one basic concept, one highly memorable monster design, and give it to someone with some very specific ideas for story and visuals, and you end up with four extraordinarily different movies that don’t even necessarily belong to […]
Of the three characters Sacha Baron Cohen created for Da Ali G Show, the homosexual Austrian fashionista Brüno was always the least funny (though, it must be mentioned, the least funny of a very funny batch), so it’s not necessarily surprising or disappointing on its face that Brüno, a shock-comedy pseudo-documentary starring featuring that character […]
As I have posited many times elsewhere on this blog, the First Age of the American slasher film consisted of a period of great ubiquity and popularity, lasting barely less than ten years (from the summer of 1980 to the end of 1989), and a protracted death rattle, that stretched more or less until the […]
Mentions of the Césars in print or in advertisements usually refer to them as “the French Oscars” or “the French Academy Awards,” which is denotatively accurate, since they are the most prestigious film award given in France, and awarded by the Académie des Arts et Techniques du Cinéma, which is parlous similar to the Academy […]
