“I didn’t intend for the ten-year-old me to come along on this trip”, muses 27-year-old Taeko (Imai Miki) early in Only Yesterday, the fifth feature produced by Studio Ghibli. And yet the fifth-grade incarnation of Taeko (Honna Youko) is a constant companion in her older self’s inner life throughout the ten-day vacation in the Yamagata […]

There are directors that everybody loves, or at least everybody knows that it’s a Big Deal when they have a new film: Tarantino, the Coens, Malick, etc. To say “I am so glad there’s a new Malick film this year” isn’t to say anything at all, other than “I watch and enjoy motion pictures”. Beyond […]

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: the movie that prefigures not just Iron Man 2, but every other comic book adaptation of the last 30 […]

Two years ago, we got an unexpected treat in the form of Iron Man, which came from out of nowhere (movies based on Marvel comics had been sort of bad for quite a while, nobody involved on either side of the camera had a proven record in effects-driven action films, the trailers were completely awful) […]

Takahata Isao had directed a number of animated television series and a few feature films when he was brought in to the fold of the newly-formed Studio Ghibli in the mid-1980s. Ghibli had been largely formed through the efforts of producer Suzuki Toshio and director Miyazaki Hayao, a longtime collaborator of Takahata’s by that point; […]

Horror remake fever creeps on- though 1984’s A Nightmare on Elm Street isn’t the youngest major American film to get the remake treatment (The Hitcher, from 1986, was only 21 when it got its very own do-over), it feels like we’ve hit ourselves a sea-change, doesn’t it? Maybe it’s just me. Anyway, it feels like […]