Years before he became arguably the most important director of feature-length animated films in the history of cinema, Miyazaki Hayao was an employee of Toei Animation, working as an animator, concept artist, and story man. That’s actually under-selling it quite a lot: he was one of the animators and concept artists at Toei, something of […]
Fish Tank boasts one of the most leading, metaphorically unsubtle, and wholly appropriate titles of any film in recent months: perhaps primed by the opening credits, it takes a stronger-willed viewer than I to require more than a few shots to marvel that, by God, it is rather like watching a poor girl trapped in […]
For all the advances made in special effects in the last ten years, werewolves have had a really tough go of it. We’ve had any number of tremendously convincing screen zombies, and marvelous vampires of both the sparkly and non-sparkly varieties, but for some reason, representations of lycanthropes have been miserably wanting. Neil Marshall’s otherwise […]
(After experimenting this way and that, I’ve realised that I can’t really write any kind of analysis of Shutter Island that addresses exactly what makes it such an irritating, dispiriting and above all unsatisfying experience, without making pretty damn free with the spoilers for the film’s massive, easily-guessed third act twist. So easily-guessed, in fact, […]
And who among us doesn’t love squirrelly old romantic melodramas altogether? he asked tentatively, well knowing that in fact many people do not love them, that many people find this kind of overdetermined, overworked combination of unlikely stories and garish emotional displays to be exactly the proof that old movies from 70 years ago are […]
If we’re to believe the permissions notices at the end of the closing credits – and if we’re not to believe them, then the very idea of movie credits is a sham and we’re all rocking on the brink of anarchy – then somewhere within the movie Valentine’s Day, though I didn’t notice it, there […]
There are so many words you could use to describe the work of Michael Haneke: bold, provocative, cruel, cold, intellectual, confusing, cryptic, frustrating, alienating, disturbing, exhilarating. He’s a bit of a wild boy like that. There’s one word that not only would I never have used, I’d have denied the possibility I might ever feel […]
The biggest problem with recommending movies to other people – not as a critic, but as an ardent cinephile who loves to share the films I adore with friends and family and people I’ve just met at a bar – is that, after the title and maybe the director, the first thing anyone wants to […]
Some words on the criteria of judging movies: In praising a meritorious film, there are a lot of words that we can bandy about, and while ultimately all of them mean something similar, i.e. “Watching this movie was an experience that made me feel like I had spent time well and was better for for […]
The title of Kim Ki-Duk’s Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring pretty much says it all: here is a story of time passing, marked by five particular moments. No points for guessing that the seasons of the title are metaphorical references for points in a man’s life, but yes, this is the story of a […]
“Fucking movies! Fucking overpaid, fucking unhappy childhood fuckers, fucking movie fucking fuckers.” -Lee Bright (Catherine Keener) If you share with me a healthy love for a certain kind of artistic indiscipline – a willingness to give a hearty “piss off!” to the money-men and the more lackadaisical bourgeois members of the receiving public, in favor […]
Michael Haneke, the art house-beloved German director probably best-known for Funny Games and Caché, has something of a reputation as a provocateur (probably because of… Funny Games and Caché) that he doesn’t quite deserve. Not because his films aren’t sometimes provocations; but that is, I think, incidental. Better to say that his is a filmmaker […]
