There’s nothing quite as wholly wretched as a tremendously dumb movie that fails to be such a violation of basic filmmaking competence for its stupidity to blossom into something fun to mock. Thus: I, Frankenstein, a movie that exactly lives up to the pedigree “from the producers” – and co-scenarist Kevin Grevioux, a fact not […]
Above all else, what Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit teaches us – if we really needed to be taught it, though we do not – is that Kenneth Branagh the director has an unstoppable infatuation with Kenneth Branagh the actor. Kevin Costner gets introduced coming up behind the camera and in profile. Keira Knightley just meanders […]
Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, from 1974, was among the first Godzilla pictures I ever saw, so I was never till now in a position to appreciate what a massive shift in the series it represented. In particular, what a jaw-dropping change it meant for director Fukuda Jun, whose four preceding Godzilla projects had all been largely […]
With 1982’s The Prefab People, the third film in what we might profitably think of as Tarr Béla’s “Social Realism Trilogy”, we finally reach the defining point where social realism seems to have begun loosing its appeal for the young director, who began with this film to explore the styles and very characteristic rhythms that […]
The most surprising thing about Ride Along – indeed, I am sore tempted to say the only thing that is in any way whatsoever surprising about Ride Along – is that it’s such a straightforward action film. There’s humor in it; Kevin Hart doesn’t find himself headlining movies that don’t have humor in them. But […]
Sheer chronological accident made 2002’s The Sum of All Fears the unwilling First Jack Ryan Picture of a Post-9/11 World, but in all particulars it feels far more like the decade-late First Jack Ryan Picture of a Post-Cold War World. Notwithstanding the fact that all of the Jack Ryan movies came out after the end […]
Looking back from 2014, Tarr Béla’s second feature, The Outsider, is a staggering break from the filmmaker’s normal way of doing things. That’s not fair at all to the movie and moviemaker who, in 1981, had no idea that he’d one day become Europe’s crown prince of long takes, slow plots, and stasis, but it’s […]
Say whatever one will about The Legend of Hercules, and most of it certainly won’t be very nice, but it’s been a really long time since a movie that was this bad and this so-bad-it’s-good, and in such a classical way. It is a bad movie – a profoundly bad movie across all the disciplines […]
Having figured out how to make a Jack Ryan action thriller with 1992’s Patriot Games, the same cluster of filmmakers (with a couple of swaps here and there) got to do it again two years later with Clear and Present Danger, in the process managing to improve virtually across the board. And I say “virtually” […]
There have been a fair number of reviewers comparing Devil’s Due with Rosemary’s Baby, which is fair on the grounds that none of the glut of “pregnant with Satan’s baby” movies made in the intervening 46 years have penetrated remotely as far into the cultural consciousness; but subgenre is absolutely the only the thing that […]
It’s impossible to say that 1973’s Godzilla vs. Megalon represents the flaming-out of the Godzilla franchise, or dropping off a cliff, or any other colorful metaphor you like for a movie series just plain giving up. After all, it came out just a year after Godzilla vs. Gigan, a movie which doesn’t leave very much […]
I would doubt that the makers of 1992’s Patriot Games were trying to be ironic – actually, that’s not the half of it: a film more free of pesky things like nuance and cleverness than Patriot Games is damn hard to imagine – and yet the title ends up playing that way regardless. The two […]
