There is a gentleman named Roger Corman – perhaps you have heard of him? And if not, how is it that you care enough about movies to find yourself reading a film blog? For Roger Corman is one of the essential producers in the annals of American cinema, the very David O. Selznick of the […]
How can you begin to fuck up a movie called Cowboys & Aliens? As it turns out, the same way you fuck up Hot Tub Time Machine, or some people think you fuck up Snakes on a Plane (I myself maintain that the latter film was the best possible version of itself): by coasting on […]
The most interesting fact about Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is that its producer, Wendi Murdoch, is the wife of media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, and that he exercised his, let us politely call it his “influence” over Fox Searchlight to make sure the film got a U.S. release. I do not claim that this […]
Errol Morris made his name as a documentarian on a run of captivating films about remarkably weird human beings: Gates of Heaven, Vernon, Florida, and the like. But after the success of his mesmerising television series First Person in the early years of the ’00s, he did as so many liberal filmmakers did in 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 how Friends with Benefits fits into the strange trend of 2011 fuckbuddy movies, […]
It remains somewhat perplexing to me that the Child’s Play films have supported such a robust (by horror standards) fandom: the first movie got by on a certain amount of uncanny atmosphere, and the second on a healthy measure of disorienting absurdity, but the classic trilogy coasted by almost solely on the strength of two […]
Two things are immediately notable about Captain America: The First Avenger. One is that it has the most unnecessarily particular title of any comic book movie since X-Men Origins: Wolverine. The other is that it’s actually fun to watch, which shouldn’t be noteworthy at all, but in this age of darker, edgier comic book movies […]
In 2005, director Michael Winterbottom collaborated with actors Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon on A Cock and Bull Story (if you, like me, live outside of Great Britain, append Tristram Shandy to the front of that title), a backstage drama about a failed attempt to adapt Laurence Sterne’s highly experimental 18th Century novel The Life […]
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: Warner’s humongous summer tentpole Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 and Disney’s barely-released Winnie the Pooh represent […]
Author’s note: This is all clearly over the top and much, much too enthusiastic about a nice film that is certainly not capital-G Great. What can I say, in the summer of 2011 I though that with sufficient cheerleading, we might still be able to get the occasional 2-D feature out of Disney. When John […]
I’ll get to the historical context in due course, but I didn’t want to bury the lede, especially because I am myself very surprised by the lede and feel obliged foreground it, on account of it being one of the bolder statements I have made of late. Here it is: I kind of love Bride […]
So, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 has opened now, and concluded an eight-film, ten-year, decade-defining franchise, and it does so in exactly the way you would expect it to do if you read the book, saw Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, and/or any of the six books and films […]
