A question that I didn’t even think about asking until recently: how long has it been since the last live-action G-rated movie to get a wide release? I get April, 2009, with Hannah Montana: The Movie. Which leads to the more pointed question, how long has it been since the last live-action G-rated movie that […]
The second of three films adapted from Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy (which was meant to be a decalogy, before the author’s terribly premature death), The Girl Who Played with Fire is in almost all ways not as good a film as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, made with much of the same cast and […]
A recap: never expecting to put together a sequel to Back to the Future, Robert Zemeckis found himself making two, right in a row, each of them telling a discrete standalone story linked by a cliffhanger ending that takes place seconds after the climax of the first movie. In such ways do time-travel narratives offer […]
Back to the Future ends with a giant smiley face of Hollywood froth; a playful, open-ended but nonetheless satisfying conclusion that promises our characters will still be around, having their adventures. The endless possibilities inherent in the story of a time-traveling car – which can fly now, thanks so much – created an infinity of […]
Reader Rachael Horcher found a way to get more bang for her buck when she donated to the Carry On Campaign – by using that sneaky word “trilogy”, she got three movie reviews for the price of one! Here is the story, the way I heard it: Steven Spielberg, having proven himself one of the […]
From among the Video Nasties I hold it a truth that bad movies are good for the soul; but a whole lot of bad movies can kind of get to you after a little while. And while I never expected this all-Video Nasties edition of the summer of blood to reveal much in the way […]
One must at a bare minimum credit Salt for being unconventional: what happens in the second half of the movie, while not exactly “unpredictable”, is certainly unexpected, if only because it’s just not at all the sort of thing that is done in American studio filmmaking. Part of me almost wants to find a way […]
There is exactly one element of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice that’s of any use whatsoever to any viewer old enough to drive themselves to the theater, and it’s not something that I, at least, would have anticipated: Nicolas Cage is absolutely on fire, bringing 1000% to a role that does not require, justify, or reward such […]
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 Christopher Nolan proves again with Inception that he’s one of the most honorable directors in the field of […]
There’s not supposed to be anything easy or straightforward about a new film from octogenarian director Alain Resnais, and Wild Grass does not disappoint. Premiering at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival just a couple of weeks before the filmmaker’s 87th birthday, the film shows no sign of his age: it’s maddening and challenging and frequently […]
From among the Video Nasties “BANNED IN 40+ COUNTRIES!” shrieks the irritatingly over-designed (and now-defunct) website for the 1978 feature Faces of Death, though it rather innocently fails to provide a list of which countries those were, exactly. It doesn’t matter either way: for the film was of course banned all over the place, most […]
Be sure to check out the Christopher Nolan Blog-A-Thon over at Bryce Wilson’s Things That Don’t Suck. It’s pretty rare for a movie that fails to live up to its hype as uniformly as Inception does (though Jesus, is it any surprise, with that kind of hype?) to still function as an enormously entertaining summer […]
