An earlier version of this review can be found here. Having been given just about the freest reigns ever given to a filmmaker in the history of Walt Disney Feature Animation, directors Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois responded with Lilo & Stitch, a dream project for Sanders, who had been noodling with the main character […]
One of the reasons I don’t particularly like awards season is its mechanical predictability: the same niches get filled every year, whether it’s the “stylistically brash film by a future-canonical director”, the “smug indictment of these troubled times”, the “underdog biopic”, the “famous person biopic”, the “studio-financed ‘indie’ that everybody likes because it is safe”, […]
Chris Walters included a list of possible reviews along with his Carry On Campaign donation, and I used the excuse to fill one of the more embarrassing holes in my film viewing history. My thanks to him for letting me cover my ass. Remember after Out of Africa came out, how there was that huge […]
The five films of director Darren Aronofsky have covered more conceptual and visually idiomatic ground than the entire careers of filmmakers with five times the output: a surpassingly cheap and grimy thriller about a paranoid mathetmatician, a whirling two-hour music video about drug addiction, a CGI-addled fantasia on the meaning of time, mortality and identity, […]
When Walt Disney died of lung cancer in 1966, he left behind a company that had no idea how to function without him. Right down to the corporate name, Walt Disney Productions had largely been a cult of personality, and once that gargantuan figure was out of the picture, nobody behind the scenes or in […]
White Material opens with a scene that, we’ll eventually learn, comes at the very end of the story. The second scene takes place much earlier, not all the way at the beginning, but comfortably before the middle. Nothing about the transition between these scenes implies in any way that they aren’t related in the usual […]
There’s been some chatter as to whether Burlesque is a bad enough movie to be good, which is sort of the wrong approach to take: I should like to claim on the contrary that Burlesque is good enough to be a good movie. It is, specifically, only as good as it has to be, and […]
