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: now we have Transformers: Age of Extinction out in the world, and I don’t even know what to do […]
There’s little doubt that the heyday of Hammer Film Productions in the 1960s is now best-known for the studio’s Gothic horror, films with Christopher Lee as Dracula and Peter Cushing as Dr. Frankenstein, and such. But while those films were being produced, Hammer was also busily cranking out a far less visible, though still awfully […]
There’s something especially annoying about a movie that veers between mostly good and very good for its entire running time, only to complete puke itself apart in the last few minutes. I present to you The Rover, writer-director David Michôd’s sophomore feature after his impressive but in many ways frustratingly commonplace crime thriller Animal Kingdom. […]
2012’s Think Like a Man is, by and large, not a very good movie. But it does an absolutely fantastic impression of one, thanks to a game cast of very talented comic actors who don’t get very much work in major movies owing to their unbankable skin color, all of them working double-time to flesh […]
In the annals of films with an influence completely disproportionate to their quality or latter-day popularity, the 1950 adaptation of Treasure Island stands out as a genuinely iconic work of pop art. I can think of no film that has influenced so many people who have never seen it in such a narrow way: it […]
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: there are not many living filmmakers whose style and interests would seem to make them a worse fit for […]
The Woman on Pier 13 had previews under the title I Married a Communist, and only came into its far less show-offy title when the test audiences rejected it for reasons that probably make perfect sense in the cultural context of 1949, but all it really says to me is that people used to have […]
Well, we finally got there: a Clint Eastwood movie that even I, ever the enthusiastic Clint Eastwood apologist, can’t pretend is worth a damn. We have in front of us Jersey Boys, a sepulchral adaptation of the 2005 jukebox musical based on the songs of the Four Seasons that has been stripped bare of any […]
The caveat first: throughout this Hollywood Century project, I’ve been using a definition of “Hollywood’ that limits us to films produced solely on money contributed by Los Angeles-based movie sturdios, or by independents working in the shadow of Hollywood. I’m now making a big exception for the first time, to accommodate 1948’s The Search, a […]
The best thing to do with complex topics, I have found, is to ease into them simply. So: House. This is, apparently, what you get when an experimental filmmaker, Obayashi Nobuhiko, who turned to making TV commercials to make ends meet, was given the chance by a big studio to direct what it hoped would […]
“Oh the Protestants hate the Catholics,And the Catholics hate the Protestants,And the Hindus hate the Muslims,And everybody hates the Jews.” -Tom Lehrer, “National Brotherhood Week” Some years ago, Northwestern film professor and queer studies scholar Nick Davis* wrote an analysis of the 2009 Best Actress Oscar race that included one of those perfectly formed and […]
Comedies, generally speaking, are at their best when they’re at their lightest and most invisible; and 22 Jump Street is always and persistently a very effortful movie. Which isn’t enough to make it bad, or even a disappointing follow-up to 2012’s 21 Jump Street, a film whose sequel could almost certainly not ever improve in […]
