The history of the American film industry from its formation into the 1950s is inextricably tied in with the history of trade unions and contracts. Here in the 21st Century, filmmaking on both sides of the camera is typically described in terms of artistry and what the actors, writers, directors, composers, cinematographers, sound designers et […]

15 years and change since Rushmore, it would seem that there couldn’t possibly be any more development in the aesthetics of Wes Anderson, a director whose personal stamp is about as obvious as anybody’s ever has been. And yet here we are, and The Grand Budapest Hotel exists, and it feels like it might be […]

I must offer two apologies, one of them to a real person. That being Okawara Takao, the director of Godzilla vs. Mothra and Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II, the 1992 and 1993 entries in a franchise that was still going strong as you please when he stepped away for a year to make Orochi the Eight-Headed […]

Everyone was 24 once. There’s nothing shameful about that. And part of the privilege of being 24 is having the absolute certainty that one is smart enough and capable enough to conquer the world, with the right break. So it was in the case of 24-year-old Stanley Kubrick, who in 1953 had only two short […]

Mary Pickford, in the 1910s and ’20s, was famous on a level which it’s truly difficult to contextualise in the modern era. It’s lazy and smacks of nostalgia to talk about how they don’t make movie stars like they used, but in a ruthlessly pragmatic sense, it’s also completely accurate: the kind of culture of […]

After bringing the bulk of Toho’s A-list monsters back to prominence over the course of Godzilla vs. Mothra in 1992 and Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II in 1993, the crew led on the latter of those films by director Okawara Takao sat out 1994’s entry in the Godzilla franchise, leaving Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla to the ministrations […]

There are spoiler-type things littered about this review; but boy, talk about a spoiler proof movie… If Eva Green never does anything with the rest of her career besides take dubious roles in doomed projects and have all the fun in the world playing her character up, down, and sideways as a giant pile of […]

Straight Shooting offers up a twofer for the the historically-inclined fan of director John Ford. Made in 1917, the year that the 23-year-old (years away from swapping out the name “Jack”) began making movies with The Tornado, it is the first feature-length project of his career, after five shorts. And with all of those presently […]

For the viewer who has thus far found the “Liam Neeson is a broken old man who kicks ass and pummels bad guys to stave off facing his inner demons” genre to be devoid of any real merit, Non-Stop provides no counter-argument (also, if a viewer could hold that belief in the wake of The […]

At heart, Tarr Béla’s curious little noodle of a movie from 1995, the 35-minute Journey on the Plain, is an exercise, not quite avant-garde enough to be a genuine experimental film but totally lacking in narrative or insisted-upon theme. And in this respect, it’s the only such film in the director’s career, for no matter […]

So, 1993’s Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II isn’t a sequel to 1974’s Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (that was, of course, 1975’s Terror of Mechagodzilla). Toho decreed that to be the official English title solely as a way of making it minutely easy on us poor anglophones to distinguish between a pair of movies that aren’t so easy […]

Director, producer, writer, micro-manager of cinematographers and editors – Stanley Kubrick was one of the most auteur theory friendly of all auteurs, for more than virtually any other filmmaker in history, he was fully and emphatically in control of every visual and sonic element in nearly all of his mature film work. I highly doubt […]