Every Sunday this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time hasn’t managed to light to world on fire, and in this it’s […]
From among the Video Nasties The Video Nasty craze in Great Britain was nominally due to the lurid covers of two particular movies, prominently advertised in publications where too many Nice People could catch an accidental glimpse of them (the actual reason for the Nasties list was of course a complex chain of interrelated cultural, […]
If you absolutely must see a new-release movie this weekend, your choice is between Sex and the City 2, a reductive and insulting view of femininity-as-commodity laced with a stunning undercurrent of reflexive American cultural superiority that creaks along for 146 unending minutes; or you can see something bad. Okay, fair is fair, I’d be […]
The full disclosure bit: I haven’t seen but a few episodes at most of the six beloved seasons of HBO’s Sex and the City, nor did I manage to catch the 2008 feature film continuation thereof. I thus have somewhere in the vicinity of no business whatsoever trying to review Sex and the City 2 […]
Recalling the enthusiastic buzz that has dogged Mother and Child, and especially its three central performances, ever since the film’s 2009 Toronto Film Festival debut, I would be tempted to indulge in a cliché: “those people all saw a different movie than I did”. Except that it’s not true, for I know exactly what movie […]
Through the end of 1993, it would be possible to make a certain generalisation about the films produced by Studio Ghibli, that would go something like this: Miyazaki Hayao directs fantasies, everybody else directs realistic stories. That neat dichotomy came screeching to a halt in 1994, when Ghibli’s second-most prolific director, Takahata Isao, gave the […]
Every Sunday this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: a whip-smart fractured fairy tale that did the ironic fantasy thing long before Shrek Forever After was even a […]
A series of rattletrap Disney parodies put out by DreamWorks Animation whenever they need quick access an amount of ready cash greater than the gross domestic product of any given African nation, the Shrek films have never exactly been my cup of tea: they’re snitty rather than clever, they shoulder most of the responsibility for […]
It’s a sign of what preoccupies Jessica Hausner’s 2009 feature Lourdes, a film much-praised at last year’s Venice Film Festival, that I walked out away from it absolutely certain that the main character, a quadriplegic young woman with multiple sclerosis played by the underappreciated Sylvie Testud, had no given name. Now I find that she […]
Even today, Studio Ghibli has the reputation (in the United States, anyway) of being the company that makes Miyazaki Hayao’s films – oh, and these others ones, over here. That’s not fair at all, of course: as of this writing, Ghibli has released 16 films* (lucky number 17 is on the way), and exactly half […]
Every Sunday this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: not the first nor the last movie to beat Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood to the punch, but almost certainly […]
Like it or not, along comes another cinematic adaptation of the oft-told tale of Robin Hood: the weary middle-aged archer who returns from the doomed Third Crusade looking only to lie his way into anonymity with some gold he stole from the bier carrying the crown of dead king Richard I, but finds himself instead […]
