Perhaps surprisingly, perhaps not, the new film Morning Glory ends up being altogether delightful and cute and entertaining, which makes it all the weirder that it’s left a distinctly sour taste in my mouth. I suspect the reason would, if I explain it, make me an asshole in the mind of the filmmakers; a suspicion […]
While Jeepers Creepers managed to find some level of acclaim among the monster-movie faithful and even a tiny slice of mainstream critics, who were perhaps seduced by the name of executive producer Francis Ford Coppola, even as it was largely dismissed by society at large, Jeepers Creepers 2 managed to lose some of the people […]
In 1940, Walt Disney was struck with the biggest setback in his career in over a decade: having raked in piles of cash never before seen in the history of Hollywood with his instant-classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, he proceeded to roll the dice on two ambitious, costly animated features, two works which […]
Several years ago, it seems, DreamWorks Animation seemed to have turned a major corner with How to Train Your Dragon – or was it really just this past March? It feels longer, at any rate, since that film came along and showed that the studio born from Jeffrey Katzenberg’s pathological (and entirely justifiable) hatred of […]
Troy Olson gave me a bit of a free hand with his donation to the Carry On Campaign, providing a list of possible review subjects. Upon looking over this list, I quickly settled upon one obvious choice, recognising that there were not nearly enough Cannon Films productions reviewed on this site. I am a broken […]
That there would be two political thrillers in 2010 about the now seven-year-old boondoggle of the Iraqi WMD program, both making the not terribly bold claim that members of the Bush administration knew damn well that there was no Iraqi WMD program, is a touch odd, but not of itself surprising. That both of the […]
Five years can be a long time. When Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed came out in 1969, Hammer Film Productions was at its absolute peak of influence and popularity. The next and final entry in the main line of Hammer Frankenstein films, Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell, was released in 1974, but the cinematic landscape […]
Early in Nowhere Boy, Mimi Smith (Kristin Scott Thomas) stands by the open grave at her husband’s (David Threlfall) funeral. She is a strict woman, well into middle age, fiercely proud of her lower-middle-class English propriety, and what we have seen of her to this point makes us wonder if she has genuine human feelings. […]
The release of the Millennium Trilogy, based on Stieg Larsson’s internationally bestselling crime novels (beginning with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), has been billed as just about the biggest foreign-film event in U.S. theaters in 2010 (the trilogy was complete in its native Sweden a year ago), though the movies in question have been […]
The three years from 1968-1970 were a period of tremendous possibility and crisis for Hammer Film Productions: still at the peak of its popularity, the company had to deal with a sudden explosion in the degree to which sex and violence could be depicted in English-language cinema, which was far less prominent in the United […]
On this election night, with millions of Americans registering their anger over the continued flatlining of the American economy, it seems fit to me to consider a movie that takes as its subject that years of abuse that got us to this point: Inside Job, a documentary made by Charles Ferguson, and inspired by a […]
Jay Marks wanted to see a horror sequel get its due appreciation for its unusual expansion upon the original when he contributed to the Carry On Campaign – and for his pains, he ended up unexpectedly sponsoring the only horror movies I ended up watching on Halloween night! So thanks, Jay. Did I find it […]
