The story is well-known, as such things go: how, adapting the serious-as-cancer thriller Red Alert into a screenplay (the book’s author, Peter George, and satirist Terry Southern also worked on the script), Stanley Kubrick got to thinking that the fact that all of humanity, in the 1960s, was being held back from nuclear annihilation only […]

The first twenty minutes or so of Under the Skin had me convinced that I was watching the best movie made in the last two or three years, at least: a cryptic sequence of sounds and images, yoked by visual motifs, that slowly and only implicitly coalesces into any kind of representation of actual things, […]

Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is, like, the eightieth frigging superhero movie to come out since I first started this […]

We must say this for The Quiet Ones: it’s not lazy. As befits the august brand name of Hammer Film Productions, it is an attempt to do something with the most bland, generic gimcrackery of contemporary horror cinema, rather than simply giving into clichés and marketing concerns. It is idea-driven, rather than incident-driven, and it […]

I might scour my vocabulary for hours and still never come up with a better single adjective to describe Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla than “frivolous”. Which is on the one hand not a word that really suggests and kind of special sin or even a legitimate failing of any sort, but on the other is almost […]

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 […]