With his fourth feature, Alan J. Pakula made a fairly decisive break with what had been his most easily definable thematic concerns up to that point, and thereby created one of the two films that have since absolutely secured his position as one of the great American directors of the 1970s. Prior to 1974, we […]
I have two nice things to say, and I will lead with one of them: the visual effects in Surrogates are well done, no two ways about it. One visual effect in particular: for much of the first part of the movie, Bruce Willis – bald, craggy Bruce Willis, in his mid-50s – is covered […]
When we last left the career of Alan J. Pakula, he had just completed the first of his major thriller-mysteries, Klute. Hindsight tells us that the director would become one of the decade’s most important makers of such movies, and thus we could be tempted to assume that he’d found his “correct” path as a […]
It’s not new for the monumentally prolific Steven Soderbergh to release two movies in a single calendar year, nor is it new that those two films should represent strikingly different styles and narrative interests, but I am comfortable in claiming that 2009 is something of a banner year for showcasing the man’s chameleonic skills, particularly […]
The emergent conventional wisdom is correct about this much: 9, the new animated feature expanded by director Shane Acker from his 2005 Oscar-nominated short, has atmosphere, and it has imaginative style, and that is just about it. The plot is, by all means, a bit of a shambles. Longtime readers have already guessed that I […]
When I included Alan J. Pakula on my poll for who most deserved a full-on retrospective (mostly at the urging of a friend, who wanted to see Pakula get his proper consideration as one of the great directors of the 1970s), it was with no small trepidation; though I didn’t think he’d come anywhere close […]
Before he became one of the most influential and arguably the most under-appreciated directors of the New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s (and long before he became one of the many New Hollywood filmmakers to turn into a parody of themselves in the ’80s and ’90s), Alan J. Pakula was a movie producer of no […]
In his scant but cult-addled filmography, director Mike Judge has earned quite the reputation as a satirical provocateur, starting with his live-action debut, the much beloved Office Space, a nasty-minded attack on corporate culture in all its forms and the deadening effect it has on the teeming masses of American workers. This was followed by […]
The direct-to-video sequel to a direct-to-video sequel; ah, the ’80s! How have we survived 19 years without you? To be completely fair, Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland doesn’t really represent a drop in quality from Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers, for the unanswerable reason that the two films were made at essentially the same time […]
The Final Destination films has always possessed a sort of crude purity. Even more than in most body count movies, where narrative is usually more of a pretext than an actual legitimate element, this series is unusually eager to admit that it’s about one thing and one thing only: absurdly contrived and colorfully violent death […]
[Author’s note, October 2021: I have softened considerably towards this film over the years and upon re-watching it, to the point that I’d now consider it my second-favorite film of the broadly-defined franchise. This review will have to stand until such time as I’m able to replace it; suffice it to say that I agree […]
