Madea’s Big Happy Family, the sole Tyler Perry film released in 2011 (which thereby became the first year with only a single Perry release since 2006), crystallises something for me: I don’t get Madea. And not in the obvious sense of what that phrase means: by this point, I imagine anyone paying attention to this […]
Sometimes, I wonder if it would be worth throwing out the entire corpus of Italian cinema from De Sica to Antonioni to Argento, if such a dire price would save us from Neo-Realism’s most disreputable legacy: non-actors playing major characters in movies for the “authenticity” it brings. That wasn’t invented by the Italians, of course, […]
For Colored Girls is the clear outlier among all of Tyler Perry’s films: most prominently because it is the only one of his features not ultimately based on his own idea, adapted instead from a 1975 theater piece by Ntozake Shange, for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf. It is, […]
There are enough reasons to like The Woman in Black and virtually no reasons to love it; but the one that got me the most is its awareness of history. The fourth feature film released by the newly-resuscitated Hammer Films, and only the second to get an actual push, after the 2010 revisionist vampire picture […]
Here’s a stat to chill the heart of any fan of painterly, hand-drawn animation and prefer their family movies to be told with gentle grace rather than screaming pop culture references and fart jokes: of the 18 feature films produced in the 26-year history of Studio Ghibli, fully two-thirds of them have been directed by […]
When I reviewed Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married?, I was able to comfortably make this observation: it was “the first genuinely boring Tyler Perry movie, on account of being the most tasteful and restrained Tyler Perry movie.” And that remains true, all these Tyler Perry movies later. It is still fairly simple and […]
In Safe House, Denzel Washington is a badass; we know this because there is a scene in which he snaps a man’s neck in a public restroom, during which a) Washington’s face is an implacable blank slate; b) the action is shown from directly above, in a stylistically brash gesture of “look at me!” filmmaking; […]
To start by answering the only question most people probably care about very much: Arianne Phillips’s costumes in W./E. are pretty great, all right. Oscar-worthy? That I cannot say. It is not the worst of the five nominees for the 2011 Best Costume Design Oscar, that much is certain. The second question: yes, it’s W./E. […]
The most inessential and unlooked-for sequel in, arguably, the whole history of motion pictures – or anyway, since 2010’s Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore – Journey 2: The Mysterious Island continues the epic saga of Sean Anderson (Josh Hutcherson), the adventuresome teen introduced in 2008’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, […]
A love story in which a deeply affectionate and utterly functional couple is torn apart when one half of the pair has a huge chunk of memory sliced clean away in the blink of an eye, leaving her with a confused but relatively happy with her place in life, while her devoted husband is left […]
There’s something I want to get off my chest to start: regular readers will know that as a matter of policy, I review (or try to) every film that hits #1 at the U.S. weekend box office. This started back in in the spring of 2009, and was my response to feeling guilty that I’d […]
The Year of Blood continues with a tribute to St. Valentine’s Day. Watch it with someone you’d love… to kill! There is something disreputably satisfying about a movie like 2001’s Valentine, which announces everything about itself in the first shot, basically: it’s 1988, and dweeby little Jeremy Melton (Joel Palmer) is at a sixth-grade dance, […]
