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: X-Men: First Class may or may not be the most ill-advised of the summer’s superhero movies, but it’s hard […]
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: X-Men: First Class may or may not be the most ill-advised of the summer’s superhero movies, but it’s hard […]
Author’s note, June 2016: I was pissed as hell at this film when I saw it, but time has mellowed my opinion. I’d still stick it on the “rotten” side of the register, but 2/5 was needlessly harsh. I don’t know if something is wrong with me or with society, but when something I find […]
On the IMDb trivia page for Phantasm II – and I am well aware that a smart person does not rely on the IMDb to be completely faultless on such matters, but the factoid was too delicious to keep to myself – there are two items that appear right next to each other, and the […]
Jessica Brown’s delayed pick for a Carry On Campaign review was actually a list of possibilities, of which I made this choice for selfish reasons: I really love the movie and had never come up with a plausible excuse to review it. Which is turning into a bit of a theme with these. Anyway, it’s […]
If Badlands defined the look of a Terrence Malick film, the themes and the humanity, it took his exemplary sophomore effort Days of Heaven to establish the filmmaker’s most characteristic hallmark: his idiosyncratic editing language, intuitive and fluid, and not at all beholden to the decades-old system of continuity editing dominant in American filmmaking. Days […]
When Kung Fu Panda came out three years ago, it was greeted with a special kind of enthusiasm beyond what it altogether deserved: for this was not just a perfectly fun talking animal comedy, it was the film that finally, after so many years, proved that DreamWorks Animation could make a good movie (or, if […]
Matt Henderson donated to the Carry On Campaign with these words: “No real essay to commission, but I will gently nudge you into considering a Malick retrospective”. Absolutely no nudge was necessary: I’ve been planning on doing this ever since the day The Tree of Life was announced. Still, I’m glad to dedicate the following […]
