There’s a terrific and deeply necessary movie that could have been made out of the basic DNA of The Other Woman. It is, for starters, basically a platonic rom-com about how a pair of mismatched women come to rely on each other as friends, and cinematic depictions of female friendships are achingly rare (contra the […]

1927 is perhaps the single most important year to date in the development of the film medium. It is the year when first the Hollywood continuity system and subsequently the cinema of the entire world was at a turning point between two paths, that of pure image, or that of image combined with sound. The […]

“How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?” screamed the breathless, wink-wink ad campaign in 1962. And this question was obviously meant to ask: how did they ever make a movie, under the moral auspices of the American film industry at that time, based on the 1952 novel about a middle-aged literary scholar and […]

Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack. Far and away the wordiest, clumsiest English-language title of any Godzilla movie – any Toho daikaiju eiga at all, for that matter. But simply a direct translation of the Japanese, and if you look at some of the original names for the classic movies in the franchise, […]

The title card of Flesh and the Devil trumpets itself as a vehicle for John Gilbert, king of the romantic leading men at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (and even just a couple of years into its formal existence, the lavish MGM was not going to cut corners on its romantic leads), leaving the pair of recent Swedish imports […]

Nearly until the end, and I literally mean, like, up until the last four minutes, Oculus makes a great argument for itself as being the best mainstream horror film since… I guess “since The Conjuring” isn’t really at all impressive. But the spirit of my point is clear, yes? It has all the stuff to […]

At the time when it was still new, Charles Chaplin called The Gold Rush, from 1925, the film he wanted to be remembered for. He’s gotten his wish, and then some – we still remember The Gold Rush along with City Lights, Modern Times, The Kid, The Circus, and so on, and will undoubtedly do […]

What I love about animation is its capacity for creating things that you did not realise could exist. Even in the days of just about every “live” action movie with any kind of budget behind it half existing in computers full of invented locations, something about the medium of animation purchases the right to go […]

We now arrive at an exciting moment, for me personally: starting with 2000’s Godzilla vs. Megaguirus, the series wraps up with a run of five movies which I’ve never seen and about which I know basically nothing. In the most extreme cases (Megaguirus is one of these), my knowledge extends literally only to having seen […]

1960’s Spartacus was the third and last feature film of Stanley Kubrick’s career that he would later disown, for the best reasons of any of them. Unlike Fear and Desire and Killer’s Kiss, it wasn’t humiliation at a half-formed talent of youth that led him to later (and “later”, in this case, means “almost instantaneously”) […]

By the mid-1920s, the American feature had more or less gotten through all of its learning curve to become the thing it is today. there were still some kinks to work out – camera movement wouldn’t be perfected until ’26 or ’27 in the States, and then after the coming of sound, it had to […]

Tarr Béla’s penultimate film (barring an un-retirement), 2007’s The Man from London, is among those movies for which more time is needed: at this writing, nearly seven full years have passed since it prickly, divisive premiere at the Cannes International Film Festival, but that event still hovers over the movie, working in tandem with some […]