If I say “Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island“, and you are anybody but a Jules Verne scholar (to judge from my Site Meter stats, there is a good possibility that this is the case), I bet that the first thing that pops into your head is “giant bees”, and if it’s not that, it’s “giant chicken-beast”, […]

Oh, Tyler, Tyler, Tyler. And I was just starting to like you, with the surprisingly competent Meet the Browns and the less-than-competent but intensely magnetic The Family That Preys back-to-back in 2008; and then you had to go and bring her back. That shrieking, inhuman Madea-thing. To make matters worse, you brought her back in […]

The second Tyler Perry film of 2008, The Family That Preys, and his fifth overall, is something of an outlier – it is one of the small number of films in his career not based upon a stage play, and it is the first of two (so far) to completely lack so much as a […]

The pity is that Chronicle is an okay movie. A simple one, and a wildly unoriginal one – the highest praise I can think of is that it’s best parts are almost exactly like the best parts of Carrie. But originality ain’t always all that, and a good Carrie knockoff is obviously preferable to a […]

Now, here is a situation I did not anticipate cropping up: I sort of liked Meet the Browns, Tyler Perry’s fourth feature as director, and one that is held in low regard among his films even by those who like the bulk of his work. Liked, not loved; it’s still awfully slight, and Perry’s shortcomings […]

There’s been a lot of chatter lately, among a certain kind of cinephile – my kind, I will admit up front, though I don’t really talk about it here – about the impending death of celluloid film as a production, distribution, and archival medium in the United States. Naturally inclining to pessimism, I suspect that […]

I haven’t seen this pointed out elsewhere, which doesn’t mean it hasn’t been, but: The Grey stars Liam Neeson as a man who responds to the tragic and premature death of his wife by journeying to extreme places to take jobs that require him to kill things. I shall absolutely not go so far as […]

When last we visited with Tyler Perry, he had just produced his third movie, and second as a director, Daddy’s Little Girls; it was the closest thing to a flop in his entire career. But by this point, the Tyler Perry Studios Money Machine had already become a big enough, self-sustaining entity onto itself that […]