The thing about Inside Llewyn Davis is that it has a phenomenally interesting narrative structure. That sounds like a euphemism, but it really isn’t; among the many things the film is doing well, its structure is easily the most unmistakable and probably the most important. This is a story about a man in his late […]
There were Godzilla films directed by men other than Honda IshirÅ as early as the second one, Godzilla Raids Again, but to all purposes, he was the man who was responsible for the series as it got off its feet: him and cinematographer Koizumi Hajime, and composer Ifukbe Akira, and effects director Tsuburaya Eiji. We […]
See enough movies – and more to the point, discuss enough movies – and you start to come up with shortcuts, boxes that you can file things in to help make it easier to come to grips with what they are and how to approach them. But every now and then something comes along and […]
There was a time when the phrase “directed by Stephen Frears” promised (to me, anyway), if not necessarily a film that was going to be life-changing in its excellence and ingenuity, then at least one which would tell a fine story with solidity and clean, steady filmmaking skill. His movies were like dress slacks: crisp, […]
Whether it is totally successful or not – and I think, in at least a couple key ways, the answer to that question is much too uncertain for the movie’s benefit – Stories We Tell is an outright heroic attempt to find a new cinematic vernacular for representing human memory. Taking the form of Sarah […]
Like The Little Mermaid before it, the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale “The Snow Queen” proved quite a trial for Walt Disney Animation Studios, defeating attempts to adapt it as far back at the 1940s. Unlike The Little Mermaid, a solution to the insoluble problem at the core of the project’s development (“how do we […]
The Great Snow Whitening of 2012 is long past and happily consigned to memory, but let us stop briefly to pay homage to the third film of that calendar year to adapt the Grimm brothers’ most famous fairy tale – the sweetly trivial Mirror Mirror and the wholly useless Snow White and the Huntsman preceded […]
We have arrived at a personally exciting point for me in this retrospective of Godzilla pictures. Up until 1964’s Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, I had already seen all of the movies, if only in a compromised English dub. But from this point, it’s several weeks straight of movies entirely new to me. And what a […]
30 November, 1993, represents the dividing point in the career of director Steven Spielberg. Prior to this, he was primarily a director of ebullient, exhilarating popcorn movies; since then, he has primarily been a director of largely serious dramas, with even his genre films tending to be more about investigating society than providing easy thrills. […]
