We are now in the 64th year of this Hollywood Century project, stretching all the way back to movies which were made in a time before narrative cinema had stumbled into such essential innovations as close-ups, shot-reverse shot, or camera movement. The earliest years of the Hollywood feature film found an aesthetic that frequently does […]
One of the grandest clichés in the critics toolkit is to refer to a classic work of satire or social commentary as being “ahead of its time”, with the passage of years not serving to blunt the impact of a film’s satiric insight but to make them seem less like satire at all, and more […]
1975’s The Stepford Wives has long since become one of those movies for which the twist ending of its central mystery has become the single thing that most people know about it. This is never a fair place for a work of narrative art to find itself, but it’s especially unfortunate for this film, which […]
It eventually had to happen, of course. Across four films from 1965-1968, Daiei’s series of films about the giant monster turtle Gamera had ranged from not too bad, to not bad enough to stop being delightful, to bad enough that their badness made them delightful. But the tank had been empty for a while, and […]
The Congress, Ari Folman’s first film since his international breakthrough with the animated pseudo-documentary Waltz with Bashir, is surely a broken-down disaster of a movie, barely able to function as an entire self-contained object. But I am absolutely confident that I wouldn’t be half as thrilled by it if that wasn’t the case: like far, […]
It is not uncommon, when people swan about, cooing with praise for the New Hollywood Cinema and the exciting American cinema of the 1970s, to act as if the whole of the film industry was engaged in thrilling experiments that met with broad favor from audiences, who for once in history were interested in being […]
The posters and trailers for the 1973 release American Graffiti, one of the most successful American movies marketed almost solely on the basis of pandering to its target audience’s nostalgia, challenged that audience to remember, “Where were you in ’62?” For the film’s director and co-writer, George Lucas, the answer to that question is that […]
As far as nine-years-later sequels go, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For… well, actually it’s pretty fucking awful, since the only other nine-years-later sequels I can think of right off star Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy instead of Mickey Rourke and Jessica Alba, and take as their explicit theme the evolution of culture and […]
There’s no piece of crap quite as infuriating as a piece of crap that had absolutely no right to be so crappy, and as evidence I offer As Above, So Below, a film that manages to squander what should be a completely un-fuck-up-able location even in the hands of the most fumbling boob. In part, […]
The first three entries in Daiei’s Gamera franchise are, for the most part, competent enough despite their incomparable cheapness that we can talk about them like they were real movies. I am terribly excited to say that we have come to the point where that’s no longer a concern: 1968’s Gamera vs. Viras (a dubious […]
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 November Man is the latest in a long line of spy thrillers that owe their exist and most […]
15 years after it was the talking point for a whole summer for both horror fans and people who did just about everything in their power to avoid horror, it’s hard to judge The Blair Witch Project simply as a thing unto itself. But then again, it always was. When it was new, the film […]
