These Birds Walk is a documentary about the life of poverty-ravaged boys in Karachi, Pakistan; and it is unmistakably made for a Western audience.This bothers me more than it has any reason to, for the film is absolutely not a sad-eyed ethnography or exotic exploration of culture – no Slumdog Millionaire or the like here. […]
The whole movie is so completely nuts that trying to select a single element and declare “this is the most interesting part” is totally useless, but certainly one of the things that is particularly interesting about Frankenstein Conquers the World is the window it provides into how Japanese pop culture shifted in its relationship to […]
Update: This review was based on what was in retrospect a screening plagued by a highly deficient projector resulting in unusually poor image quality. While I don’t suspect that I’d ever come anywhere close to actually liking the movie, it’s safe to say that my actual thoughts are more of a 6/10 than a 5/10, […]
The Best Man Holiday – which possesses a truly awful title, I hope we can all agree; even a simple apostrophe-s after “Man” would have helped – is the weirdest sequel of the year, greeted with some awfully hostile “why on earth are you bothering?” criticisms. I wish more films would do exactly the same […]
Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster represents the most profound shift in the fortunes of the Godzilla franchise throughout the first 20 years of its existence. On the most essential level, it’s the point where outright science fiction entered the picture, and as a direct result, it’s the point at which the series’ evergreen screenwriter Sekizawa Shinichi […]
There’s nothing, as I recall, specifically wrong about The Hunger Games, the massive smash hit that sent a brand-new franchise into the stratosphere early in 2012. There’s also nothing specifically right about it – it’s a perfectly satisfactory piece of consumer product with some smart casting choices and a humongously forgettable script. While its first […]
You know Tay Garnett? You probably haven’t heard of Tay Garnett. The fact of the matter is, Tay Garnett really isn’t a terribly important film director, though there are those among us who perk up at checking out what promises to be yet another ’30s or ’40s programmer, and unexpectedly find his name attached. I […]
In the first place, there’s absolutely no shame in failing to successfully adapt William Faulkner’s 1930 novel As I Lay Dying into a cinematic form, as self-indulgent multi-hyphenate James Franco has so conspicuously failed to do. It is one of the most formally bookish books ever written, and while I think the word “unfilmable” really […]
In the wake of tragic, violent crimes, there’s a ubiquitous, easy, and simple response: shake your head, look downcast, and intone in a very mordant tones, “What sort of person would do a thing like that?” What’s not ever supposed to happen, is somebody actually going out and answering that question, and that’s the most […]
Director Thomas Vinterberg’s 1998 sophomore feature, The Celebration (or Festen; I’m never clear on which is the preferred U.S. title), is one of the agreed-upon masterpiece of 1990s cinema. That being said, I don’t personally have much use for it at all, owing in part to it being the flagship of the Dogme 95 movement, […]
Very rarely, we’re given the great and deep privilege of seeing a movie that reaffirms our collective humanity and opens us to worlds of joy and hope and pain and fear and love that we never knew existed. Movies that are emotional and spiritual journeys as much as they are a collection of images strung […]
The highest goal and greatest privilege of fantastic cinema is to present the audience with wonderful sights that we have not seen. But there’s a sneaky caveat to that: we all want imaginative genres to showcase one-of-a-kind new images that are the same one-of-a-kind new images that we already expect to see (e.g. Avatar). There […]
