For a solid 20, even 30 minutes, I was quite convinced that Captain America: The Winter Soldier wasn’t just the best movie in the now nine-film mega-franchise called, for want of something more attractive, the Marvel Cinematic Universe; I was quite convinced it was the best comics-related work of cinema since The Dark Knight in […]
The production backstory of The Raid 2: Berandal (the subtitle, which translates as “tough guy”, “thug”, or something like that, is present only in ad material and not onscreen, at least not in the U.S. release) is surprisingly useful in hacking through what the thing is, and why it feels a little… but we’ll get […]
Typically, Paths of Glory is described as an anti-war movie, but this is accurate only to a degree. It is, certainly, a movie that has fairly intense negative feelings about the act of warfare and what it does to the people fighting in them, with American cinema’s first really horrifying depiction of what was once […]
We are happily no longer in a place where the dismissive (if only inadvertently) phrase “the third one” needs to be applied to silent comedy star Harold Lloyd. Though he was once a mostly forgotten sidebar to the always-iconic Charles Chaplin, and later, as Buster Keaton began to be rediscovered, written off largely as the […]
It’s wonderful what desperate humiliation will do. 1995’s Godzilla vs. Destoroyah was announced and sold, with great purposefulness and gravity, as the final Toho-made Godzilla film until the character’s 50th anniversary in 2004, while the Japanese company would silently remain on the sidelines as Tri-Star over in Hollywood made its own trilogy of movies with […]
It became eminently clear halfway through 1998, with the release of the American Godzilla, that Toho’s planned retirement of their most prominent kaiju superstar wouldn’t end up being as long-lived as had been the intention, and plans for a proper Godzilla movie to come out the following year were put into place. But their back-up […]
The truly exciting story of the 1922 Sherlock Holmes, starring John Barrymore, has nothing to do with the mysteries encountered by the titular sleuth in the course of the movie, but rather the amazing fact that we can, in 2014, talk about the film to begin with. Sherlock Holmes was one of the many, many […]
Nobody wants to out themselves as a moral scold about art, but sometimes a fella stumbles out of a thing like Sabotage and just can’t form any clear thought beyond “that was vile”. As a plot (super-macho DEA agents who work best outside the system are rocked by betrayal and the knowledge that someone is […]
Darren Aronofsky has, we are told, been nursing the idea behind Noah for fifteen years, or basically immediately after making his feature debut with π. It was only the spectacular and unexpected success of his 2010 Black Swan that finally convinced a studio to give him the giant sum of money needed to make it, […]
The foremost of all the non-pressing questions I have regarding the 1998 American Godzilla – pro tip: there is no such thing as a pressing question about the 1998 Godzilla – is whether or not it’s the worst film of the Godzilla franchise. And I suppose I should really first ask the question if it’s […]
