At one point, I suggested on this very site that 1997’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park was “readily the worst thing [Steven Spielberg] has ever made”. I will now freely admit that I was speaking those words from a position of fearless intellectual dishonesty: until re-watching it for this review, I had not actually seen […]
So, what can a body say about Lilo & Stitch 2: Stitch Has a Glitch? It exists. It’s probably a better fit, formally, with the original Lilo & Stitch from 2002 than the first of that film’s direct-to-video sequels, Stitch! The Movie, but it’s not nearly as compelling a follow-up from a storytelling standpoint. Also, […]
Jurassic Park is a beloved classic of popcorn cinema, still a cultural touchstone two decades on, and as keen a demonstration of Steven Spielberg’s peerless skills at directing clean, effective populist entertainment as anything you could ask for, so I imagine it will be able to survive just fine if a schmuck blogger like myself […]
From among the Video Nasties The making and production of The Evil Dead has become a legendary campfire story in its own right: writer-director Sam Raimi, looking to make his first feature, creating a demo short and forcing it upon potential investors; borderline-inhumane working conditions for most of the cash-strapped location shoot; a rapturous, career-making […]
If you were feeling nice about it, you could say that Derek Cianfrance’s sophomore feature, The Place Beyond the Pines, is a bonus: it’s basically three movies for the price of one. For that is its frankly ballsy structure, to have one kind of story that ends with the first scene of a second kind […]
Does 2005’s Tarzan II deserve bonus points just for not looking like ass as much as Tarzan & Jane? I don’t really know. I’m giving it those points anyway. In fact, not only is Tarzan II visually improved over its hugely unimpressive predecessor, I’m at least a little bit tempted to call it the single […]
How much easier life would be – or at least, the composition of this essay – if Evil Dead was as consistently bad as it has every reason to be. It is, after all the remake of a truly iconic original, Sam Raimi’s 1981 debut feature, and horror remakes as a class are not terribly […]
It’s not exactly the case that Empire of the Sun is Steven Spielberg’s most “divisive” movie, in any useful sense of that word (that’s almost certainly A.I. Artificial Intelligence). It’s something a little bit weirder than that: a movie that nobody really pointedly dislikes, unless they’re already suspicious of the director’s tendency towards sentimental manipulation, […]
Having exhausted the stable of Winnie the Pooh’s colleagues and associates in the Hundred Acre Wood with The Tigger Movie, Piglet’s Big Movie, and Winnie the Pooh: Springtime with Roo, which is, title be damned, about Rabbit, the Walt Disney Company was in trouble. How to create continued marketing opportunities with their Pooh franchise with […]
The Sears-exclusive Kardashian Kollection is given a shout-out in the end credits of Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor – that’s Tyler Perry’s Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor to those of you who like clumsy titles to be even clumsier – and I won’t say that this has anything to do with the fact […]
Many of the sequels produced by DisneyToon Studios – many, many, many, many of them – betray the emotions and themes of their precursor movies from the actual Disney canon. So it is no surprise that Mulan II does this. What makes this particular movie stand out, then, is how much it betrays itself: while […]
The good news: with From Up on Poppy Hill, which was released in Japan in 2011, internationally beloved Studio Ghibli finally managed to bring back a director for a second time, outside of the legendary pair of Miyazaki Hayao and Takahata Isao. It is, accordingly, the best indication that we’ve ever had that the studio […]
