I’m not the first nor the hundredth nor the thousandth to point out that the explosion of film noir could only have happened in the aftermath of World War II (the genre was established by 1940, and its roots extend back into Germany in the ’20s, but as a phenomenon, it’s a strictly post-war concern). […]

There’s one very specific thing happening in How to Train Your Dragon 2 that would cause me to kind of love it a bit even if it the rest of it was a crashing failure instead of a small disappointment. Which it is, unfortunately; still one of the top handful of movies ever made by […]

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: we have two sequels coming out in one weekend to films that had no right to be as great […]

I do not know – and I suppose if I really wanted to know, I could find out – what the stops are along the history of “realistic” war films; what caused people to start making movies in which combat was a joyless, dispiriting slog full of mortal dread and not a noble calling that […]

We now hit the point where Stanley Kubrick, Methodical Auteur, turns into Stanley Kubrick, The Hermit Artist. Four years, almost to the day, separated the premieres of 1971’s A Clockwork Orange and 1975’s Barry Lyndon, not quite enough to make it the biggest gap in his career to that point; and given the complexity and […]

There’s nothing as fascinating as an utterly inexplicable mash-up, of the sort we get with The Perfume of the Lady in Black from 1974: basically, what we have here is Roman Polanski’s Repulsion filtered through the heavy stylistic lens of the gialli, Italy’s genre of gorgeous, atmospheric, usually inscrutable murder mysteries from the ’60s and […]

“This is a story of the Unconquerable Fortress: the American Home…1943” You know Mrs. Miniver, yes? Let’s talk about it like you don’t: Mrs. Miniver is a film about British Fortitude on the Home Front during The War. It strike a massive chord with wartime audiences, ending up the highest-grossing film of 1942, winning six […]

It’s burned into the genre that Fatal Illness Love Stories tell lies about fatal illnesses, and that’s just that. But it’s a hell of a lot more irritating when the story opens up by making an explicit, special claim for itself that this time, we’re going to get to hear the truth about what it […]

In all the history of cinema, there few subgenres that I find delightfully weird and random than one that existed for only a few years, between 1942 and 1945, made a staggering quantity of money, and ceased to have any function after World War II ended. I don’t even know if the style has a […]

It’s just not goddamn fair, sometimes – Edge of Tomorrow is already a bona fide box office flop, and this despite being the most effortlessly pleasurable summer popcorn movie I’ve seen in… oh, well, a couple of years, at least. Maybe “effortlessly” isn’t the right word, not at all. Edge of Tomorrow is, in fact, […]

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: Edge of Tomorrow uses a science fiction war as backdrop to a story of a man who relives the […]

There’s an important thing to keep in mind when watching any film made in the United States about World War II, and especially those made during the war itself: it wasn’t, physically, an American war. To the British, for six years, the war was a constant looming threat right across a terrifyingly thin stretch of […]