Prior to seeing Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, the question foremost in my mind was, “is there any possibility that it’s a parody?” And now, having seen it, the replacement question is, is there any possibility that it’s not?” The film is the latest in the weirdly extended trend of Dark, Violent, Modernised fairy tales […]
Memory will tease you sometimes. It has been some years since I last watched the 1998 film adaptation of Les Misérables, and I recalled it as being a somewhat heinous bastardisation of the book that was nonetheless a pretty solid piece of prestigious costume-drama filmmaking. Upon revisiting it, I’d be inclined to almost perfectly reverse […]
Hey everyone, let’s play a fun game I invented, called “Being Jessica Chastain”. Pretend it’s late 2011, and you are a 34-year-old actress who has gone from complete anonymity to ubiquity in the blink of an eye. You’ve already been in the year’s best-reviewed art film, and you’re one of the most-praised members of the […]
There are dumb action movies, and there are dumb action movies, and the distinction ‘twixt the pair is rather narrow and indefinable. It cannot be stated as an orderly rule, but is rather a matter of context and tone and, yes, subjectivity; my dumb movie might be your dumb movie, and vice versa. All of […]
And now our little tour of English-language Les Misérableses takes us to the point I’ve been most excited about all along: a 1978 Les Misérables produced by Lord Lew Grade’s ITC Entertainment for British and American television, the only feature-length, sound adaptation in the English language I had not previously seen; for it is certainly […]
The found footage horror movie, birthed by 1999’s The Blair Witch Project and thrust into the big time by 2008’s Cloverfield, burned itself out rather quickly, as will happen to a genre so cheap that you need neither a good idea nor talent to whip together something which enough damn fools will trudge out to […]
There’s a movie that Gangster Squad wants to be, and it would be so wonderful if it had managed to carry it off: clearly, there was a point where the intent was to make a movie according to all the very best clichés and worn-out tropes of a 1940s crime movie – the film being […]
The Hunchback of Notre Dame II is like your first hangover: no matter how many horror stories you hear about how unfathomably, almost comically despicable it is, and no matter how much you steel yourself up for such an irredeemably foul experience it’s going to be, you simply cannot be ready for it and by […]
If I describe Julia Loktev’s second feature, The Loneliest Planet, as having some of the absolutely best shots of people walking that I have ever seen in a motion picture, I fancy that I have both demonstrated what is the general shape of the movie’s appeal, while also demonstrating why that appeal is undoubtedly limited […]
The most obvious thing one can notice about The Rabbi’s Cat is its lively sense of contradiction: here is an animated movie done in a brightly colored cartoon style, with gorgeously smooth lines and detailed drafting unsullied by too much fussiness in the coloring and shading, and it involves the misadventures of a talking cat, […]
Inasmuch as it’s ever the “wrong” time to adapt a movie from one of the foundational texts of contemporary Western literature, 1952 was an odd year for 20th Century Fox to mount a new American Les Misérables. The 1930s’ great spate of prestige pictures based on classic 19th Century novels that had birthed the studio’s […]
The critic must not try to hide his biases when they might get in the way of the review; and boy, did I ever head into Silver Linings Playbook, at long last, with a basketful of biases. “Bradley Cooper as a romantic lead” is very close to the least appealing combination of performer and role […]
