It’s a bit silly to talk about a director’s sophomore feature as representing all sorts of breaks from his customary style; but hindsight permits us to observe that 2007’s Daddy’s Little Girls, the second film directed by Tyler Perry and the third he wrote, is something of an outlier. It is the first of his […]
The first thing is, the accusations that Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is exploitative 9/11 porn, while true, miss the point. That particular bed had already been shat in by the horrendous 2005 source novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, which leaves only the argument that, well then, maybe they shouldn’t have made the book into […]
Diary of a Mad Black Woman made a lot of money. Like, a whole lot, particularly relative to how much it did not cost to make. If one is in the position of a Lions Gate executive, and one has just released a film that cost practically nothing, and made a huge amount, what does […]
Steven Soderbergh has, for a while now, been conducting experiments and going through exercises, more than he’s been making actual, functioning movies. Some of us find this unbearably exciting, and some of us are turned off by it. I find it unbearably exciting, and that’s why I loved the living hell out of Haywire (a […]
There are a whole lot of films based on the plays of William Shakespeare – some of them aren’t even Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet – and the great majority of them are bad. Alright, “bad” is a strong word: some of them are bad, such as George Cukor’s stillborn 1936 Romeo and Juliet that […]
Sometimes, we compare movies to fast food: usually McDonald’s and usually in the context, “Some entertainment is like McDonald’s – no damn good, but it’s comforting to know what you’re getting”. This is a lazy comparison, but it has the benefit of being a really poppy image that anybody who’s ever eaten at a McDonald’s, […]
It’s really kind of odd when you reflect on it, given how much the man has become a national point of reference, but a mere seven years ago, white people had no idea who the hell Tyler Perry was. Leastways, I did not, nor did my white people friends. This fact is, and should be, […]
There is possibly no filmmaker now living better-qualified to direct a movie set entirely within a single apartment than Roman Polanski, whose historical basis in such locations includes an entire “apartment trilogy” of horror films: Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Tenant, each of them a master class in giving physical location a breathing vitality that […]
I shall begin with a parable. Barry Ackroyd, in more than a quarter of a century as a cinematographer, has been responsible for many fine pieces of work, with at least a handful of award-worthy turns in projects like The Wind That Shakes the Barley, Green Zone, and The Hurt Locker (for which he received […]
If you had wanted to see Joyful Noise for its promise of a whole movie full of Queen Latifah versus Dolly Parton camp-offs – and I can truly not imagine any other possible reason that a person could have for wanting to see Joyful Noise, unless they were related to somebody who worked on it […]
In addition to their classier, better-known status as the most mature decade in the history of mainstream American cinema, the 1970s could also be rightfully called the Decade of the Rip-Off; not since the onset of World War II taught the world a healthy sense of shame had such a robust culture of knock-offs and […]
“I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.” -Michael Caine It is commonly observed of Jaws: The Revenge – in those fortunately rare moments when Jaws: The Revenge is brought up to begin with – that it establishes […]
