If there’s anything that could imaginably help The Pyramid to stand out in the cramped world of low-budget horror (spoiler alert: there is not), it would be the surprising way that the film confounds the expectations of first-person camera filmmaking. The film equips itself with a grand total of three POV machines – one documentary […]
Joe is the most rewarding film directed by David Gordon Green in years, and it’s also the film that leads me to suppose that there’s probably no real hope of him ever returning to the exemplary heights of his early career. It is a clear improvement on and refinement of the concerns of Prince Avalanche, […]
Conventional wisdom holds that the eighth season of the undying television juggernaut The Simpsons was the last that regularly hit the highest peaks that the series was capable of summiting. And while I don’t know that conventional wisdom has necessarily decided which season exactly was the last one where the show was still predominately good, […]
Last year’s superlative At Berkeley dropped me squarely into the “Frederick Wiseman, where have you been all my life?” phase of my cinephilia, and now National Gallery confirms it: this man’s documentaries are magnificent, essential, pure cinema. You can draw a line straight back from National Gallery‘s patient and inflectionless shots of people standing in […]
The history of classical Hollywood film style, based in a characteristic form of continuity editing that dates back to the early 1920s, tells the story of making things easier and safer. This is the dominant theme that courses through every study of box office trends, every memoir of a director or actor’s career, every aesthetic […]
No-one likes a prescriptivist, but I’m going to put on that hat for a moment anyway. It is preferable, I think, that movies should be movies first and foremost – that whatever it is they’re doing, it’s something that couldn’t be done in any other medium or art form. And this, I think further, is […]
There’s no value in the critic pointing out that a new film doesn’t matter because an old film got there first. But there’s also no real value in a new film trying to cover material that won’t ever be improved upon. The thing is, Errol Morris already made A Brief History of Time, and there’s […]
Transformers and its sequels are not very brainy films. I think that we can all agree on that, regardless of how we specifically feel about the films otherwise. They are, in fact, about as non-brainy as science fiction cinema gets. And this is typically held against them by people and critics who would like our […]
It might not be intentional (though I suspect it probably is), but the British-Irish comedy-drama Frank plays a game of such meta-textural delicacy that the whole movie couldn’t really exist if it hadn’t succeeded. To wit, we have here a film that acts as hard as it can like an idiotic quirky comedy from the […]
There was, to begin with, Braveheart. That film’s depiction of violent, manly battles in an undifferentiated Olden Days setting begat Gladiator, and between the two of them, the five Oscars each of them won (overlapping only on Best Picture – they didn’t even win the same Sound award), and the huge amount of money Gladiator […]
Hany Abu-Assad’s Omar feels like the kind of movie that gets nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, which is exactly what happened to it. That’s not a criticism, and it’s certainly not a compliment, but the film’s “type” is clear enough: a political story told through a personal drama, harsh enough in its […]
There is much to be argued for simple things done well. I present for your approval Beyond the Lights, a backstage melodrama and love story that invents nothing, does not surprise, and is still one of the most rewarding films to come out (and then almost immediately vanish) in the waning months of 2014. Blame […]
