Lisa Cholodenko’s drama-laced comedy The Kids Are All Right is generous and warm-hearted to a fault, though as faults go, that’s one of the best to have. Examining the dynamics of a non-traditional family without message movie condescension, nor does it play up the quirky elements of the scenario; it’s just so damn humanist I […]
With memories of How to Train Your Dragon and Toy Story 3 still lingering heavily in the air – to say nothing of the aftertaste of the feature animation annus mirabilis that was 2009 – it’s not hard to want Despicable Me to be better than it is. Yet at the same time, with things […]
The very idea of Predators confuses me a little bit. It has been 23 years since the original Predator, a film that most everybody likes, and 20 since Predator 2, a film that very few people like, and in that gargantuan two-decade span, the only thing keeping the franchise alive, cinematically, have been Alien vs. […]
Every week 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: call me the most boring man alive, but I couldn’t think of a fitter way to greet the attempted […]
From among the Video Nasties In the special features of a very carefully and lovingly assembled 2002 DVD – the film’s first legitimate release in several years – director Nico Mastorakis admitted that the motivation behind his debut and most famous work, 1976’s Island of Death, was entirely financial. One year before he started making […]
Like a lot of other filmmakers with a good visual sense and apparent no idea how to structure a story or write dialogue, M. Night Shyamalan has been the subject of much “if only he’d direct someone else’s screenplay!” conjecture since his career started tanking in earnest with 2004’s The Village (which at the time […]
U.S. theaters aren’t going to bear witness this year to a more brazenly functional title than Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky, which describes the film’s content in fairly absolute terms. The sharp-eyed pedant might point out an even more descriptive title in Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky Have a Love Affair, though I maintain that […]
The latest entry in Summit Entertainment’s multi-year attempt to bore the art of filmmaking to death, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse has been warily described in certain corners as “better” than 2008’s Twilight or last autumn’s The Twilight Saga: New Moon. Which takes quite a lot of fine parsing, and for what possible reason: At the […]
Every week 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: we’re pretty much used to blockbuster movies such as the current perpetual money machine The Twilight Saga: Eclipse aiming […]
From among the Video Nasties When the Director of Public Prosecutions assembled the legendary list of Video Nasties, they obviously couldn’t be bothered to do something unreasonable like watch all of the movies they wanted to publicly prosecute, to make sure they were actually obscene. So some shortcuts were taken: if a film sounded like […]
Jim Thompson was one of the great pulp authors of American literary history, a crime novelist active primarily in the ’50s who wrote some of the harshest, most grueling prose in 20th Century English fiction. Besides contributing to Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing and Paths of Glory, he’s had a number of his books made and […]
I Am Love, a film birthed out of years and years of conversations between actress Tilda Swinton and director Luca Guadagnino, is a basket of contradictions: it is at once a heaving mess of hugely melodramatic situations and emotions and visual cues that are at times presented with inordinate subtlety, and it all hinges on […]
