Having arrived in 1963, our Hollywood Century project now completes its first half. And it pleases me greatly that such a milestone should be commemorated with one of the quintessential Hollywood films of all time – maybe the single best example of the grand, epic, stupid indulgence that only Hollywood filmmakers could ever fully enjoy. […]

And now for Fun with Cognitive Dissonance: it is possible for a sequel to to be a lot better than its predecessor, and still end up mostly a huge pile of shit. I give you The Purge: Anarchy, which takes the concept laid out in last year’s The Purge – every March 21, the government […]

There has never been a time anywhere in the history of commercial cinema that was terribly easy on aging women, but for a stretch of the 1960s it was perhaps slightly easier. For that decade bore witness to the brief flowering of the dubious genre of “hagsploitation” in which famous actresses in their 50s and […]

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: since the Italian genre film began revving up after the Second World War, filmmakers have been putting Greek hero […]

1951’s The Thing from Another World is one of the weirdest cases that we those of us who generally subscribe to auteur theory will ever have to deal with. It’s a Howard Hawks production (Hawks was one of the key names when the Cahiers du cinéma crew began formulating the theory), but not a Howard […]

Considering how much its visceral, rubbery gore effects, electronic score, the niceties of its lighting and film stock, and especially its position in the center of a maelstrom of controversy about these goddamn violence-driven horror pictures with no characterisations beyond “this guy dies then that guy dies” all mark it out as a quintessential product […]

The one thing that can never be claimed of the 1961 Western One-Eyed Jacks is that it’s like other movies. Lumbering and bloated, often compelling, always gorgeous, and at times astonishingly bizarre in its attempt to force the psychological impulses of mid-century naturalist theater acting into the framework of a bog-standard Western revenge thriller, I […]

There’s no intellectual merit in expecting a sequel to Planes to be anything other than a sequel to Planes. So can any of us be “disappointed” by Planes: Fire & Rescue? On the contrary, it’s a bit of a pleasant surprise: it’s probably a little bit better than Planes, with a far more engaging third […]

To get the grubby part out of the way first: Life Itself is a somewhat banal piece of documentary craftsmanship. A lot of talking heads, e-mails represented by onscreen text, old clips. It’s something we’ve all see a billion times, and it is frankly disappointing that Steve James, the man who made the expansive epic […]

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’ve hit the point where something as dire as Planes: Fire & Rescue legitimately qualifies as one of the […]

The signal characteristic of Otto Preminger’s Exodus from 1960, a story of the founding of the modern state of Israel, has nothing to do with the film’s sensitive political content; nothing to do with the iconic, stirring Romantic main theme of Eric Gold’s deservedly Oscar-winning score; nothing to with the fact that this is the […]

Don’t miss the first part of this two-part review! It says everything that the titular character character from the 1997 Jack Frost is the soul of a serial killer, who turned his victims into meat pies, inhabiting a snowman who murders people, including one whose face he bites off with his icicle teeth, and he […]