G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra was the second-worst Hasbro-derived sci-fi/action movie of summer 2009, a very competitive title. I’d like to say that the franchise only had room to go up, but Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen would be sitting in the corner, taunting me if I did that, and it’s best not to […]
Narratives need premises, that’s just how it works. Without a premise, you’ve just got people standing around with nothing to do. So, let’s go ahead and let Olympus Has Fallen have its premise: North Korean terrorists have taken over the White House, holding the president and several cabinet members hostage in a subterranean bunker, and […]
Full disclosure: my feelings towards director Harmony Korine (without, admittedly, having seen every last one of his features) are largely hostile. I’m not terribly much a fan of filmmakers who are outright provocateurs to begin with, but where as your Lars von Trier or your Michael Haneke at least have unmistakable talent and a kind […]
As a whole, the Canadian War Witch is an extremely solid, sobering account of a teenager’s descent to hell during a civil war in an unspecified African nation, made with extremely clear-eyed restraint from harangues, sentiment, message-mongering, or anything else that would cheapen its central character’s suffering and fight. That this still qualifies as a […]
Dean DeBlois, I am sorry. This whole time, through both Disney’s Lilo & Stitch in 2002 and DreamWorks Animation’s How to Train Your Dragon in 2010, we’ve all been like, “Chris Sanders is so great”, and “good for Chris Sanders, nurturing Stitch as an idea for so many years”, and “poor Chris Sanders, couldn’t make […]
You’d be forgiven for assuming that Winnie the Pooh: Springtime with Roo is materially about the kangaroo child of the title, the youngest and most innocent member of the Winnie the Pooh universe. It is not. Instead, it’s a straight-up A Christmas Carol riff set at Easter, with the role of Ebenezeer Scrooge being filled […]
The Call is really two movies, and one of them is actually pretty good. It’s the first one, and somewhat the longer (the whole thing comes in at a blissfully contained 94 minutes), and it is about a setting that, to my knowledge, has never been used in a procedural thriller before, which is in […]
In his reasonably young career, Chilean director Pablo Larraín has been fighting a hard, bitter battle against long-gone dictator Augusto Pinochet, with largely good results. His second film, Tony Manero, is a breathtakingly cynical black comedy about the degradation of culture and morality in the end of the 1970s, and its follow-up, Post Mortem, a […]
When I started on this increasingly stretched-out marathon of Disney sequels, one of the few things I was genuinely looking forward to – one of the things that felt like might make the whole damn thing worthwhile – was arriving at the first DisneyToon release of 2004, The Lion King 1½. I’ll admit that my […]
There’s no doubt that Stoker goes for it, for every given value of “it” you can come up with. And this is absolutely the saving grace of a movie that is all over the place, totally unconcerned with whether it’s making good or bad decisions, and generally flaunting its own grotesqueness in a way that […]
dundundundundundundundundun…“FLASH!” *lightning strike*“AH-AH!”“SAAAAAVIOR OF THE UNIVERSE!”*Daaaa, daa da daa da!*dundundundundundundundundun… Of course Dino De Laurentiis made a Star Wars knock-off. If there’s a shock there, it’s that he made just one, 1980’s Flash Gordon, a big-budget version of the comic strip and movie serial from the 1930s that at one point, De Laurentiis had in […]
It is right, and a good and joyful thing, that producer Dino De Laurentiis and director Roger Vadim should have collaborated on a film. Their careers were too complementary for there to have been any possibility of them both bopping around Europe at the same time without colliding. Indeed, the fact that 1968’s Barbarella was […]
