I genuinely don’t know if Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan saved the Star Trek franchise, or forever condemned it. Hopefully, that doesn’t come across as heresy: like pretty much else willing to concede the existence of Star Trek movies prior to 2009, The Wrath of Khan is my ready pick for the best […]
We’ve officially hit the point where it’s just silly: we have arrived at the existence of Brother Bear 2. What explains the justification for this project, if anything, beyond the power-drunk realisation that the DisneyToon Studios DTV films cost very little to make and brought in at least some amount of profit no matter what, […]
I weep for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, as I would for a brother. Honestly. Rechristened by audiences as The Motionless Picture almost from the instant it opened in December, 1979, it has never once shaken the reputation of being a joyless slog, neither pleasurable in its own right nor remotely successful as a big-screen […]
Of the 16 films made between 1949 and 1981 that featured visual effects by the great artist Ray Harryhausen, you could mount a serious argument that not one of them is very good. I would not personally agree with you (at a stone-cold minimum, Mighty Joe Young and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms are both […]
Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: there has not been one second since the title was announced that I have felt anything but dull rage […]
You can just about watch an era snuff itself out with Clash of the Titans, the final film for producer Charles H. Schneer and effects artist Ray Harryhausen (who also took a producer credit on what is frequently held to be the great labor of love of his career), and the first of those men’s […]
There’s not much point at all in discussing Star Trek Into Darkness without employing spoilers, big huge damn spoilers. One of them is a spoiler for something that’s really damn obvious and you’ve almost certainly figured it out already if you’re actually interested in the movie enough to read a blogger’s review of it. One […]
To begin with, let us first point out that One Million Years B.C., Hammer’s 1966 contribution to the caveman genre, rests its success on two qualities that are impossible for a 12-year-old boy to resist: some of the very best dinosaurs found anywhere in cinema before Jurassic Park came along with its CGI creations, and […]
Jonathan Swift’s beloved 1726 satire Gulliver’s Travels has had such a miserable history in its various cinematic adaptations that picking one out as the “best” isn’t saying a goddamned thing, other than “this version actually includes something other than Lilliput”. Which, as it happens, 1960’s The 3 Worlds of Gullivers does, and that’s a huge […]
I’m talking completely out of my ass, you understand, but I think there’s a very strong possibility that the alien invasion turned back by plucky humans might be the single most common scenario in 1950s cinema, irrespective of genre, across all countries. Aye, even more common than “radiation makes animals huge” pictures. Invasion films span […]
It is a sad truth that lovers of the great classic B-movies have to face, that many of them are actually bad, except for that one spark that makes an otherwise wholly unremarkable programmer seem to be more dear and unique than it really is. And so it was even in the career of the […]
The problem with Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby – a problem with The Great Gatsby, I had better say – there are many problems, and some of them are more debilitating than others, and some really aren’t “problems”, but idiosyncrasies. Let me start again. See, there’s a lot of The Great Gatsby where it seems […]
