The shockingly – one might fairly say unprecedentedly – successful Mexican import Instructions Not Included possesses a title and the skeleton of a plot (womanizer has an illegitimate child dropped on his doorstep, must take care of her) that makes it absolutely obvious what kind of film it is: a warm and cuddly two hours […]
I sincerely doubt that Riddick counts as “long-awaited” – in order to await something, you have to assume that there’s a real possibility that it’s probably going to exist, and I don’t see how even the most devoted fan of the Riddick films could have imagined that during the back half of the ’00s – […]
The chief appeal of Pitch Black, easily, is that its concept is so sparse: thuggish dude sees in the dark, monsters live in the dark, dude kills monsters. It’s not high art, but it gets the job done well, and the movie’s simplicity formed a good canvas for David Twohy to lightly scratch in the […]
To be sure, the 2000 genre film Pitch Black is a rattletrap old spook show, with a debt to Alien that’s extreme even by the standards of the “extraterrestrial monster devouring people bloodily” genre. It boasts a mixture of stock characters and regrettably “clever” characters that, all things considered, would have been better off with […]
After releasing Three Colors: Red in summer 1994, Krzysztof Kieślowski announced that he was done making movies. It took his premature death from a heart attack less than two years later to seal that promise (I am, invariably, dubious about any artist’s “retirement” while they are still able-bodied and of sound mind), but even without […]
To begin with, there’s no getting around it: The Grandmaster was massively fucked with on its way to U.S. theaters. Is it clearly the case that the changes that director Wong Kar-wai executed under the watchful eye of chop-happy impresario Harvey Weinstein make the film worse? Search me. But it’s just not possible to watch […]
Conventional wisdom holds that Three Colors: White is the least among the Three Colors trilogy, and I guess that I agree with that assessment. I suppose that it’s possible to have a least-favorite panel of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, too, and about as useful to the field of arts criticism. The particular reasons that White […]
The first thing one must not do with swan song of the great Krzysztof Kieślowski, Three Colors, is to reduce it to a simple puzzle of symbolism. This is something one really must not do with a great many films, of course, but in the case of Three Colors, the temptation is unusually high, given […]
Frankie Avalon wanted to play roles that befitted a man in his mid-to-late 20s, and new mom Annette Funicello wanted to spend time with her family, but by God, American International Pictures was American International Pictures, and they were going to make another beach party movie before all was said and done. That movie was […]
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: the problem with concert documentaries, like One Direction: This Is Us, is that they’re hardly worthy of that name […]
There’s much to say about Cube, a 1997 sci-fi horror film and philosophically-laden mindfuck by director Vincenzo Natali, but before I get into any of that, a word of praise. Because this, this is how you do a low-budget movie. Only enough resources to build one cube-shaped room? Then build that cube-shaped room as best […]
