The unbridled imaginations at Disney have managed to do it again, creating a fantasy beyond belief. With its new live-action Cinderella, the studio has managed to do the impossible, and portray a version of the classic fairy tale heroine who’s even more of an insipid doormat that the one in its 1950 animated classic. For […]
A review requested by McAlister, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. The ingredients are pretty standard early ’40s Hollywood comedy, so you wouldn’t know it just to glance at it, but Ball of Fire is a very special movie. And not just because every film directed by Howard […]
There’s no inherent reason to compare a Korean horror film and an Australian feminist parable, but throughout the entirety of 2006’s Cinderella, from director Bong Man-dae and screenwriter Son Kwang-soo, I couldn’t keep myself from thinking about Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty from 2011 (whether I’d have made the same connections if I’d seen the films […]
A review requested by Andrew Yankes, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Here’s something of a paradox: David Mamet doesn’t know shit about directing films, if we’re to judge from his 1991 book On Directing Films (as pristine an example I can name of the bizarre fixation that […]
The Slipper and the Rose: The Story of Cinderella is, to begin with, an absurd anachronism. For anyone in the English-speaking world to try to put over an overlong spectacle-driven megamusical in 1976 was psychotic – the last hit film on that model was the five-year-old Fiddler on the Roof, and that was itself clearly […]
Discussions of the 1957 telefilm Cinderella tend to hinge on its role in the developing stardom of 21-year-old Julie Andrews; or build themselves around its screening history, nodding to the fact that it was considered lost for many years before the kinescope recording of its live broadcast on 31 March, 1957 was rediscovered. And they […]
A review requested by Scott D, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. I say this as someone born 12 years later, but it’s probably not possible for anyone who wasn’t around in 1969 to genuinely grasp the enormity of The Wild Bunch upon its initial release. We can […]
A review requested by Travis Neeley, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. By 1974, Brian De Palma had seven features under his belt, with the seventh, 1973’s Sisters, having kicked off his legendary run of Hitchcock riffs. So we cannot possibly call Phantom of the Paradise, the director’s […]
It’s clear long before Maps to the Stars reaches its conclusion that whatever it finds there is going to be unfulfilling. The film thrives far too much on a shaggy, wandering tone of mystified bitterness that flares up regularly into hilarious, but pitch black comedy; it finds interesting and unexpected echoes and overlaps between scenes, […]
A review requested by Bryan L, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. To begin with, we have here a biopic – and does any genre so reliably connote “this is a well-polished and achingly handsome lump of Serious Art that’s not terribly artistic and even less entertaining” than […]
Having thought about it for a couple of days now, I still haven’t decided if Focus is particularly enjoyable and solidly-crafted for a bad movie, or if it’s extremely inconsistent and frustrating for a good movie. I think I ultimately tend towards the latter, if only because no project that depends so successfully on movie […]
A review requested by Mike Gibson, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. I shall start with a personal anecdote, since who doesn’t love personal anecdotes from nominally objective arts critics? But “a man goes to the movies. The critic must be honest enough to admit that he is […]
