From among the Video Nasties During the Video Nasties era, movies of every stripe made it onto the DPP’s hit-list: slashers, gialli, art films, gory science fiction, and plenty besides. But two genres made a particular splash, and they’re the two genres that most reasonable people would likely consider the most appropriate candidates for a […]
No sane person goes into a Jean-Pierre Jeunet film looking for quietude, but even so, Micmacs – his first feature in half a decade – is a hell of a lot of movie. Compared to his earlier work (and despite a plethora of references to classic Hollywood cinema, the only reference point for Jeunet is […]
Takahata Isao’s most recent feature to date, as of June 2010, My Neighbors the Yamadas opens with an image that is simultaneously simple and deeply significant: a child’s pencil drawing, forming before our eyes. There are two meanings to this opening shot, one ironic and the other quite serious. For there is, on the one […]
Basically, Splice is one of the most confounding horror movies I’ve seen in quite a long time. Parts of it work magnificently well, parts of it work magnificently well while being incredibly hateful, and parts of it are just plain stupid. There are going to be a lot of people who see it, and hate […]
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: though comic books have been adapted over and over and over again, especially in the last 30 years, the […]
From among the Video Nasties It’s long been a private suspicion of mine that nearly all of the truly important, influential films in cinema history are also bad. There are exceptions; there always are. But in the main, if a film is extraordinarily significant for this camera technique, or that type of editing trick, or […]
Marmaduke is a self-evidently bad idea for a movie. It is a comic strip that is so criminally unfunny that it begins to approach a peaceful kind of grueling awfulness, where one reads the strip not to be amused, but to have life re-affirmed: civilisations may rise and fall (and some have in the fifty-six […]
1994’s Pom Poko was the eighth feature-length film produced by Studio Ghibli; it was the seventh to be directed by either Miyazaki Hayao or Takahata Isao. That this saturation of the studio’s creative output by just two filmmakers – neither of them young men – was less than ideal needs no explanation, and thus it […]
It was once the case – and not too long ago, at that – that a new zombie film from George A. Romero was a seriously exciting and important event in the world of horror cinema. At their one-per-decade pace, his …of the Dead films weren’t just your typical gutmunchers, they were Events, and their […]
