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: let us set aside the other issues surrounding Pixar’s Cars 2, and think of it as being the latest […]
My short thoughts on Cars 2: it is gorgeous – as gorgeous as any animated movie is likely to be in all of 2011 – and it commits itself to world-building with such an incredibly minute (anal-retentive?) focus on even the teeny-weeniest details that it’s hard not to bow in its direction even though 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: pretty much everybody can tell you why the new Green Lantern is spectacularly misconceived, but it’s just par for […]
Two things brought about the existence of Phantasm IV: Oblivion, released in 1998 (before I get into either of them, I need to get something off of my chest: the posters and the onscreen title treatment make me want to type it out as Phantasm: OblIVion, which is at once cooler and much stupider. Recall […]
I am not going to be so bold as to say that Green Lantern is good, but this much is certain: it is a hell of a lot better than it looks. Which isn’t saying much, considering that it looks unspeakably abysmal but we take our pleasant surprises where we can find them. The film, […]
Not so long ago, I cracked, in regards to Mike Mills’s second feature directorial outing Beginners, “if you’ve ever nurtured the desire to see Christopher Plummer dancing in a gay club, you’ve got your chance”. The joke turns out to be on me: Christopher Plummer dancing in a gay club takes up all of three […]
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: noted mystery-spinner J.J. Abrams cements his status as Major Popcorn Movie Director with Super 8, but another big name […]
Let me get this off my chest first: yes, there are lens flares in Super 8. Lots of them. Some of them are in places where they add a dash of beauty or wistfulness, most are not. And even the “good” ones feel like it took much too much work to get them there. One […]
When it was released, Phantasm II hit a sweet spot where it was not so successful that Universal Pictures was eager to pay for a second sequel; on the other hand, it had managed to scrape up enough business that Universal was interested in distributing such a film, were it to be produced on somebody […]
An older review of this film can be found here. It is not demanding more of The Tree of Life than it can withstand to call it the defining film of Terrence Malick’s whole life. From the moment he first began drafting the script to what was then called Q, in 1978, it was fully […]
This review is based upon the 135-minute cut of the film released to theaters in January, 2006. An earlier review of this film can be found here. After ending his 20-year sabbatical from motion pictures with 1998’s The Thin Red Line, Terrence Malick upped his game something fierce. It only took a scant seven years […]
After Days of Heaven, Terrence Malick vanished from the face of cinema. It was not, as is sometimes suggested, a deliberate retirement; he actively pursued at least a handful of projects in the years after his sophomore effort, including his creation-to-today epic Q and a biopic of Jerry Lee Lewis. Yet is there not something […]
