First off, what the hell kind of title is Stitch! The Movie, anyway? If Chris Sanders’s long-gestating creation, the mayhem-inducing and thoroughly sweet alien monster Stitch was just a small side character rather than one-half of the title and co-protagonist to Lilo & Stitch, then we’d have something. But this is no more Stitch! The […]

There are good and bad things aplenty with Oz the Great and Powerful, but I am very pleased that the one which bothers me the most is a petty nitpick on a formal element. In an effort to recall the 1939 MGM film The Wizard of Oz – and goodness gracious, does Oz TGAP ever […]

We are presently living through the second attempt by the Walt Disney Company to make a crypto-sequel to the hugely beloved 1939 MGM film The Wizard of Oz, and it’s proving very much like their first: since the Oz books published by L. Frank Baum in the first two decades of the 20th Century have […]

The Last Exorcism was a ramshackle old thing, with some very clear charms: it had more conceptual integrity than a lot of found-footage horror, and while it was hardly a powerhouse of complex themes, it was a least trying to raise questions rather than just rely on jump cuts and musical stings to keep the […]

Atlantis: The Lost Empire was the first of two overt attempts in the early ’00s by the Walt Disney Company to court an adolescent male audience with its animated feature films, a quest that even a decade and change later still seems unreasonably dumb to me. Adolescent males are and were the one market segment […]

My apologies to Bryan Singer and his Jack the Giant Slayer, which I’ve been mocking for months as being the most ridiculous extreme of the “let’s make fairy tales darker and edgier and violent and action-packed” trend that led through Red Riding Hood and Beastly up to this year’s strange self-parody Hansel & Gretel: Witch […]

The Sting is not a great movie because of its ending. Let’s just get that out of the way. It is, undoubtedly a fine ending. It is the exact perfect ending to that movie, in fact, and no movie about con men has ever done such a good job of baking a con against the […]

2013 surely won’t bear witness to a more egregious appeal to authority than the one that opens Dark Skies: “Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” -Arthur C. Clarke The award-winning author and inventor would undoubtedly be happy to know that his gravity was […]