It’s hard to tell which seems quainter: that there was once a time when the very idea of a mad scientist creating human-animal hybrids was so offensive to common standards of decency that it could get a film more or less banned, or that there was more recently a time when the title The Island […]
Edgar Rice Burroughs first published his novel A Princess of Mars in serial form, under the title Under the Moons of Mars, exactly 100 years ago, and various Hollywood studios have been working on turning it into a feature film for at least 80 of those 100 years. At long last, it has been produced […]
Two films starring Elizabeth Olsen, the younger sister of Mary Kate and Ashley, premiered on 21 January, 2011, at the Sundance Film Festival. One of these was Martha Marcy May Marlene, and it was so buzzed-about and well-regarded that it was snatched up and given a nice awards-baiting berth and gifted by Fox Searchlight with […]
The title of a work of art can be a lot of things: metaphorical, suggestive, cryptic, punning, stentorian. Or, it can be merely descriptive. But even as a merely descriptive title, 1964’s Robinson Crusoe on Mars deserves some kind of prize. Films with titles that feel more like a pitch meeting than a legitimate name […]
Many years ago, David Wain directed and co-wrote a film called Wet Hot American Summer, a terrifyingly good comedy that at once parodies and honors the tradition of early-’80s teen sex farces, which has amassed one of the most robust cults of any comedy made in the last decade and change. Since then, Wain’s cinematic […]
2012 marks the eighth year that Amanda Seyfried has been a Young Actress to Watch, following the one-two punch of her supporting performances in Mean Girls and Veronica Mars, and at some point those of us in her cheering section are probably going to get the message and go home. Maybe if they do an […]
If you turned off the sound – or better yet, if you saw it, unsubtitled, in a language you don’t understand – The Lorax might even seem like a pretty great animated movie. For it is gorgeous: hardly a single one of its 86 minutes fails to hold some absolutely breathtaking mixture of texture and […]
Winning Oscars can do terrible things to a film: on the one hand, it’s probably the safest guarantee that a movie from the ’30s or ’40s will continue to get modern eyeballs on it, but it also invariably raises expectations that, the Oscars being the Oscars, don’t tend to be sufficiently paid off. And so […]
Eleven films into his directorial career, Tyler Perry has, you might think settled into a groove. On the contrary! His newest, Good Deeds, demonstrates that the filmmaker continues to learn new tricks, and by “new tricks”, I mean “that cameras have zoom buttons”. And boy, does he use this newfound skill like a rabid animal […]
In Darkness, an excessively serious-minded Holocaust drama directed by the unimpeachably sober prestige film specialist Agnieszka Holland, is such a tailor-made winner of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar that even now that it’s all done, I still can’t believe that it lost. Especially since it actually turns out to be quite good, despite a […]
It can’t really have been five years since we didn’t care about Ghost Rider, can it? Aye, and the sequel that nobody wanted has taken every bit of that long to come out and promptly be ignored by virtually the whole world: and yet here I am, reviewing Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance anyway, because […]
