With The Killing, we arrive at a very exciting moment in the career of Stanley Kubrick, just shy of his 28th birthday when the film premiered in June, 1956: his third feature and sixth project overall is the very first work of the director’s career that he’d acknowledge existed in later years. That’s not entirely […]
Rebirth of Mothra II – its Japanese title is Mothra 2: The Undersea Battle – is a bad movie. That’s not special on the face of it. A lot of daikaiju eiga are bad. But ROM 2 has somehow managed the first Toho monster movie which, in my estimation, is just bad bad – not […]
Latter-day considerations of the 1921 mega-blockbuster The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse tend to focus on the contribution of one or both of two men when looking to explain its success and effectiveness. One of these was Rudolph Valentino, an Italo-Franco actor born Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Pierre Filibert Guglielmi di Valentina D’Antonguolla, who had spent […]
When Disney conducted its grand experiment in rebuilding the Muppet brand name in 2011 with The Muppets, the results were inconclusive: pleasingly off-kilter and nostalgic, but in the most punishingly authoritarian way possible. Nostalgia was, at a certain point, the only driving element of the plot and the only thing to get back out of […]
Having killed off Godzilla in 1995’s Godzilla vs. Destoroyah, sending the corpse off to America to be violated even further, Toho found itself in the unprecedented position of having no giant monster franchise to go along with a marketplace where giant monster movies were still doing pretty decent box office numbers in Japan. The good […]
An open question for which I would honestly and none-snarkily beg for an answer: could anybody who likes up-and-coming actress Shailene Woodley – and a quick peek at the internet promises me that there are many of you – please explain why? Is it a The Spectacular Now thing? Because I still haven’t seen that. […]
Above all else, the best reason I can think of for adopting a historically-oriented approach to art appreciation is that there’s so damn much history just sitting there. Limit yourself to only the stuff produced in any given year, and you’re going to make some discoveries and have a great deal of random dross to […]
Godzilla vs. Destoroyah, from 1995, was literally advertised in Japan with the slogan “Godzilla Dies”. But even if you didn’t know that going in, it’s a film that positively oozes fin de siècle gravitas and sincerity and gloom, making it very clear that whatever the story the film intends to tell, it will arrive at […]
For anyone with much investment in Stanley Kubrick as a cinematic stylist – and it’s hard to imagine anyone being significantly fond of him as a director without having a lot of specific affection for the surface-level elements of his style – his sophomore feature, 1955’s Killer’s Kiss, is somewhat of an ideal case study. […]
Following 2000’s Werckmeister Harmonies, Tarr Béla took a seven-year break before making his next (and penultimate) feature, The Man from London, and this remains the longest break between long-form projects in his career to date (as I write these words he’s given no indication that he doesn’t intend for his post-2011 retirement to stick, but […]
Funny to say about a movie whose immensely cryptic plot can best be summed up as “humanity dances on the brink of cosmic destruction and lashes out violently in desperation”, whose characters are almost all nameless townsfolk except for the protagonist who becomes more unknowable the longer we spend time with him, and whose average […]
The first surprise – ah, hell, it’s the only surprise, let’s be honest – is that Mr. Peabody & Shermanis not terribly good, but it’s not terribly good in the way that DreamWorks Animation features tend to not be terribly good. That is to say, it’s not a hell-spawned devouring nightmare that leave nothing but […]
