There’s nothing respectable at all about beating up on a 14-year-old in print, and it is the inalienable right of Jaden Smith to be 14 years old, something that most of us were at some point. But this leaves us at something of an impasse, because Smith is the chief problem with After Earth, a […]
First, the caveat that looms over the rest of this review like a symbolically-laden pair of candlesticks on the mantel: the 1982 film of Les Misérables directed by Robert Hossein, from an adaptation he wrote with Alain Decaux, is an absolute bitch to find in an English-subtitled version. At least, I couldn’t find one, after […]
In the month prior to the opening of 2009’s Star Trek, I set myself to the task of re-watching all ten extant Star Trek features. Not to blog about them – a rare movie marathon that I didn’t see fit to document for all time just to prove that I did it – but to […]
Sometimes, artistic genius sneaks up on you before it clocks you upside the head, and that is exactly what happened to me about one-third of the way through Before Midnight For whatever reason, the third installment of the every-nine-years study of evolving romantic feelings and the different ways that men and women view the world […]
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: combining two things that go together pretty well, all things considered Now You See Me combines the showy world […]
The operating theory that we’ll be sticking with for the foreseeable future is that Canadian horror films, taken as a whole, demonstrate a certain maturity and honesty about character psychology that’s mostly absent from their U.S. counterparts, taken as a whole. That might not apply to each and every movie made on either side of […]
And so, what kind of a career-defining statement is the last feature-length movie to be directed by Steven Soderbergh, until he changes his mind and starts making them again? None whatsoever, thankfully. The thought of the curtly unconventional Soderbergh making a pat “this is my theory of everything, good night” gesture is anathema to his […]
