In her day, Lois Weber was regarded as one of the greatest, if not the greatest film director in America, but unlike contemporaries and near-contemporaries such as D.W. Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille, and Charles Chaplin, her name has not survived to any kind of broad recognition among general film buffs or even those with a […]
The opening image of Pompeii is an extreme close-up of a body covered in the ancient ash that exactly preserved its shape, against a black background, the sinewy camera movements letting us see every angle and the 3-D camera accentuating and exaggerating all the crags and shapes in glorious detail, using the best and brightest […]
There is much about The Square that is admirable, and I don’t want to interrupt myself once I’ve gotten going on about it, so I want to get my single biggest negative comment out of the way first. This documentary is fantastic journalism, but pretty run-of-the-mill cinema. As so many are. There is a test […]
Imagine, if you will, that one marriage you know that seems absolutely miserable and dysfunctional, the one that seems like it should have ended years ago, and nobody understands why it hasn’t yet. And yet the participants are obviously committed to each with the ferocity of a rabid dog, making it clear by this point […]
There are old movies – really old movies, I mean, movies from the first 15 or 20 years of cinema, when the visual language and narrative structures were so different from any of the norms we’ve grown accustomed to in the intervening decades that it’s virtually a different art form altogether – so self-assured and […]
Even by the standards of a movie franchise whose immediate prior entry featured an 80-meter dinosaur spitting beams of nuclear energy at a giant carnivorous rose that was cloned from the dinosaur’s own DNA, the 1991 film Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah is really peculiar. Not, entirely, peculiar and bad. And I do not regard as […]
Noted Hungarian miserabilist Tarr Béla. A movie titled Damnation. What do you need, a road map? And I would love very much to tell you that you’d be wrong to expect this film to be a punishing, cruel-minded exploration of a world-as-literal-Hell mise en scène, but then I’d be lying. This is every inch the […]
I will confess right off that I was planning to dislike Dirty Wars, and in all honesty, on a strictly intellectual level, there’s a hell of a lot about it that’s dubious. Though directed by Rick Rowley, it is told exclusively from the perspective of co-writer and narrator Jeremy Scahill, correspondent for The Nation magazine, […]
The 2014 remake of 1987’s RoboCop (the word “reboot” is reserved only for remakes that start new franchises, and that doesn’t seem to be a concern here) is a useless thing that tells a story which isn’t very interesting in a way that is desperately tedious, but by God, it’s so much better than RoboCop […]
The important part first: BioGoji, the Godzilla suit featured in Godzilla vs. Biollante, is my all-time favorite design of the iconic creature. It’s not flawless – like all of the VS Series Godzillas, it has chunky thighs that suggest that too much devouring nuclear sites and not enough time jogging is taking its toll (but […]
Good, bad, so bad it’s good, what really matters about RoboCop 3 is that it’s just plain damn dumb. Dumb as a RoboCop sequel, dumb as an action movie, dumb as an early ’90s film that vividly wishes in every way that the ’80s were still happening. Following upon two notably violent, nasty movies, it […]
The existence of 1990’s RoboCop 2 was an inevitability; almost as inevitable as the wet noodle the project would turn out to be. The original RoboCop fell into a particular sweet spot where it left plenty of room for a sequel to fit in storytelling-wise, while also leaving very little purpose for that sequel to […]
