Dallas Buyers Club is the absolutely perfect conclusion to the massive, damn near unprecedented career rejuvenation that Matthew McConaughey has been undergoing since Bernie premiered: having over the course of six films, now, totally reinvented himself as an ambitious, layered, flexible vessel for interesting auteurs to mold in interesting ways, the actor now has a […]
Watching Prince Avalanche, it’s not difficult to feel like it’s Christmas morning, and you got almost the present you wanted. I mean, it’s still really great, and you’re glad to have it but… it’s just not right, and the harder you insist that it’s still really good, the harder it becomes to ignore how disappointing […]
1964’s Mothra vs. Godzilla is a film of great significance for its franchise and its genre. From a marketing standpoint, it was the first time that two previously unconnected daikaiju from the Toho bestiary were pitted in battle against each other; as such, it sets the tone for the next eleven years of Godzilla films […]
There wasn’t, of course, a single moment when Toho ceased to think of the daikaiju eiga as a serious genre for prestigious, big-budget filmmaking, and instead turned it into, basically, kids’ stuff. Shifts like that are a process, not an executive decision, and from the vantage point of 1963, we still have a couple unabashedly […]
Ever since it won the Golden Lion at the 2012 Venice Film Festival, Kim Ki-duk’s Pieta has divided its audiences into “fucking brilliant!” or “fucking garbage!” camps just as harshly and brutally as its protagonist acts when he beats delinquent debtors into crippledom. And we now understand, at least in the abstract, where that sharp […]
Escape from Tomorrow is worse than bad: it’s a soul-crushing disappointment. This film grew from the kind of idea that is only going to work one time – shooting an entire feature film, surreptitiously, on the property of Walt Disney Company theme parks – and it’s goddamn criminal that the best thing that writer-director Randy […]
This week, our marathon of Toho’s daikaiju eiga takes us to a pair of movies that are not, in the general scheme of things, considered to be monster movies in any real way at all. But like the fella once said, “come on, it has a giant damn monster walrus. Don’t be such a hard-on”. […]
There is a certain type of film, destined to never move beyond the art house, so challenging and unconventional in its storytelling and visual vocabulary that it needs to train the adventuresome viewer how to watch it, in the act of watching it. Carlos Reygadas’s fourth feature, Post Tenebras Lux, is not that kind of […]
Speaking as one to whom Thor represents the current nadir of the ambitious but increasingly samey Marvel Cinematic Universe, I am pleased to think that Thor: The Dark World represents a distinct step in the right direction. Though not, perhaps, a terribly large one. It fixes one gaping problem I had with the first movie, […]
It’s easy to look at the increasingly formulaic animation coming out of American studios and despair for the state of the medium, but that’s why we have foreign animators (and the distribution company GKids, quickly turning into the best friend that a U.S.-based animation buff has nowadays). To whit, we now turn to The Painting, […]
King Kong vs. Godzilla arrived in Japanese movie theaters in 1962 (and American theaters, in a considerably different incarnation, in ’63) after a strange and tortured path through Development Hell that stands up with the greatest making-of stores in cinema history. As you’d expect, when the two greatest giant monsters were put onscreen together for […]
My expertise on the daikaiju eiga of the 1950s, extends only as far as what I’ve written and watched over the course of this marathon of Toho kaiju, and I should thus be careful around definitive statements, but seriously: 1961’s Mothra absolutely has to be the flat-out weirdest of the first-wave kaiju films (by which […]
