Lord knows, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, the 2009 film that is more or less the reason that Sony Pictures Animation has any sort of brand name cachet at all, is not looking to break ground. It has a hapless male protagonist with a wacky animal sidekick, a ditzy girl supporting character, a doe-eyed […]
The question I would ask, for a start, is whether Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is chiefly a Harry Potter movie, or chiefly an Alfonso Cuarón movie. This is, of course, dumb as fuck: there are people who have seen and worshiped and idolised Prisoner of Azkaban who probably haven’t even heard the […]
Prisoners is the sort of movie that becomes more baffling the further I get from it, which feels like the exact opposite of what should be the case. Basically, we have here a movie in which damn near every stylistic choice from the director, the crew heads, and the actors suggests an achingly serious consideration […]
It is not an unnoticed fact, but one still worth mentioning, because it is fun, that the career of Alfonso Cuarón repeated itself in a weirdly specific way. First, in 1991, he made Soló con tu pareja, a Mexican film with political overtones, that features a lot of sex. Then he went to America and […]
They say that good things come to those who wait, and I am happy to report that after months of patient waiting, 2013 has finally produced a movie that’s so bad it’s good, in the form of 3-D sports/dance hybrid Battle of the Year, something of a b-boying themed remake of the 1989 taekwondo tournament […]
At the time it was happening, the brief but showy run of modern-day literary adaptations of the late ’90s (bracketed approximately by Clueless in 1995 and O in 2001) was immensely annoying, at least to me; too much enthusiastic cribbing from the flash-and-dazzle teen culture of the day, far too many shrill attempts to find […]
Generally speaking, In a World… is so gosh-almighty damn adorable that it’s way too easy to lose track of how weirdly dense its script is. Herein, we have a movie that wants to be an affectionately wacky inside-baseball comedy about one of the most marginal acting fields in the film industry; that wants to be […]
American independent filmmaking is as capable of producing uninspired, derivative hackwork as any other production model, and frequently has in the past few years. But sometimes, things just click, and we’re lucky enough to get one of those truly interesting and meaningful stories about normal human lives in all their intoxicating smallness that make people […]
A Little Princess is, I guess, significant in that it ushered hot new Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón into Hollywood filmmaking out of nowhere, in 1995 (Sólo con tu pareja, his only previous feature, had screened at Toronto and made a splash, but never received U.S. distribution until 2006). But to me it is far more […]
When James Wan, the co-creator of the dismal Saw, came out with his ghost story Insidious, I was stunned at how good-to-great it was for the bulk of its running time. And earlier this summer, when The Conjuring bowed, I was outright gobsmacked that this director, of all directors, had just like that become one […]
Alfred Hitchcock is probably the closest thing to a consensus pick for the greatest film director of all time, between critics, historians, general audience, and hardcore film buffs, but even he was a mortal, and could not do every thing he applied himself to. Notably, and predictably for a man promoted as “the Master of […]
It is a greatly satisfying thing that the first shot of Sólo con tu pareja, the first feature directed by Alfonso Cuarón, is a tracking shot towards an exquisitely-lit man and a woman having sex. That’s as close a one-image summary of the director’s subsequent career as you’re likely to run into, particularly when that […]
