Pirate movies were dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. The pirate movie had died many times since its heyday, from the early-’20s through the mid-’50s. It had a very high-profile death in […]
The once-proud DisneyToon Studios, formerly a mighty machine ceaselessly cranking out sequel upon sequel to the films of the Walt Disney Feature Animation canon, has of late been reduced to listlessly cranking out Planes and Tinker Bell movies at a slow drip. And between these two points, we run almost the whole gamut of the […]
David Fincher has directed nine features as of 2014, and 2002’s Panic Room is almost beyond question the least interesting one to talk about on its own merits (which isn’t to say it’s his worst: even that would make it more interesting). This is exactly why I picked it as his representative in this series: […]
As the Hollywood Century takes us into the 21st Century and thus near to the present day, I shall find myself increasingly hard-pressed to do much good situating the films I’m discussing in any kind of historical context: we’re still in that historical context, for the most part, and it will take a few more […]
And so, Nymphomaniac; or is it Nymph()maniac? There are more than just cosmetic reasons for the latter to count as the actual title, since the dividing line between nymph and maniac is even more important to the film’s project than the fact that an open parenthesis followed directly by a close parenthesis looks in the […]
There are two ways to primarily think about Erin Brockovich, I believe: one is that it is among the most conventional films in the career of director Steven Soderbergh, which isn’t to say that it’s really so conventional as all that, but coming sandwiched in his career smack-dab in between The Limey and Traffic, it […]
It’s stretching a point to call The Unknown Known a “sequel” to The Fog of War, but they make for a hell of a double feature. At a sufficient remove, the films are all but identical: Errol Morris, one of the great pop-journalist documentarians of the modern world, interviews a controversial U.S. Secretary of Defense, […]
If nothing else, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 demonstrates with bleak efficiency that the director can only do so much. Francis Lawrence, making his second Hunger Game, still has all the chops he demonstrated with 2013’s The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and back further still to the 2007 adaptation of I Am Legend, […]
How does one try to summarise 1999 with one review of one movie? It was arguably (by which I mean “almost certainly, but let’s not be smug know-it-all dicks about it”) the single most transformative year of American filmmaking after the collapse of the New Hollywood Cinema. A stunning number of major filmmakers made some […]
Knowing that I’d eventually get to write about Saving Private Ryan – to grapple with my own wildly inconsistent feelings about it over the years, as well as to challenge all of you, my readers, to do the same – has been one of the things that I’ve been most excited about since the very […]
The biographical documentary Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq looks like a TV episode and has the generic structure of a TV episode, and what do you know? That’s because it is an episode of the PBS documentary series American Masters, given some extra breathing room and a tiny theatrical release. So it feels […]
Hype is a brutal fucker. Coming to Whiplash cold, it might be entirely possible to find it a fun, nervy little sudser about Type-A personalities clashing with lacerating verbal violence, done up in an appropriately hyper if not terribly innovative style. Coming to it, instead, with the knowledge that it’s pretty much a done deal […]
