He adored Paris. He idolized it all out of proportion. Uh, no, make that he, he romanticized it all out of proportion. Better. To him, no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in warm golden tones and pulsated to the great tunes of Cole Porter. These are not the […]
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: the single best piece of counter-programming of the year has to be the head-to-head faceoff between two intensely different […]
Once there was a struggling independent filmmaker whose name was Don Coscarelli, and he wanted to make a horror movie. The 22-year-old had produced and released two features by the end of 1976, both fairly prosaic tales of small town teenage life, both of them lacking that certain something, that frisson which can only come […]
When The Hangover opened in 2009, a lot of people – including myself – were a great deal gentler with it than it deserved. I cannot speak for anyone else, but in my particular case, it was a matter of sheer, untrammeled joy that there was a comedy that was actually funny, and moreover a […]
I have not seen, in quite some time, a movie that has messed with my head as thoroughly as Meek’s Cutoff has these past couple of days: torn between my lustful admiration for its visual aesthetic, my removed admiration for its narrative anti-flow, and my utter bafflement as to whether its climax-deflating final scene is […]
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: eight years after making pirates the toast of pop-culture once more, Johnny Depp and friends are back to try […]
I think this is a telling anecdote: the night after I saw Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, I found myself at a party with some other gentlemen who’d already seen it as well. “Wasn’t it the worst thing ever?” one of them asked (no, but that’s a forgivable response), and then the important […]
Kevin Olson made his donation to the Carry On Campaign a long time ago, but only recently made up his mind what review he wanted. Given our shared love of Italian horror, it’s no surprise he went that direction; but I owe him a debt of gratitude for introducing me not just to a movie […]
There’s a lot of interesting chatter out there about the sociological status of Bridesmaids, a film that looks to have finally cracked the seemingly insurmountable wall of “Guys won’t see movies about girls”, and that represents a massive sea-change in the output of the Judd Apatow Filmmakers Circle, which has for the first time released […]
When last we saw director Scott Stewart and actor Paul Bettany collaborating, it was on a religious-themed action/horror hybrid that had virtually nothing to do with anything resembling coherent real-world theology, and it involved undead monsters that were a damn sight cooler than the insipid movie they found themselves inhabiting; it was called Legion. Now […]
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: it’s the nature of vampires, being that they are creatures of evil, that they must be hunted by warriors […]
Nathan Morrow managed to sneak his donation in at the last minute to become the final person to donate to the Carry On Campaign – though he wasn’t the final person to put in a request. His pick is a movie I’ve adored for ages, though I never quite got around to making an excuse […]
