A review requested by Josep, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. There are plenty of things that could be one’s immediate response to Big Deal on Madonna Street, a 1958 Italian caper movie that is one of the small handful of films directed by Mario Monicelli to have […]
There is very little about 1958’s The Blob, on paper, that distinguishes it from all the other God knows how many dozens of films from that decade that pitch a bunch of small-town teenagers against some kind of monster from outer space, a mad scientist’s lab, or maybe just a good old-fashioned nuclear disaster. It […]
A review requested by Coco, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. It should be no surprise when a movie titled The Milk of Sorrow turns out to be unrelentingly bleak, but the film’s opening minutes are shattering beyond anything one could be prepared for: over black, we hear […]
In looking at the vast corpus of American movies made between 1945 and 1968 that are typically considered under the umbrella of horror, one thing that leaps to mind is that, almost without exception, they aren’t scary. Nor, in a great many cases, does it seem like trying to make them scary was ever the […]
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 failed theme park of Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel Jurassic Park finally opens for business in Jurassic World, with […]
Jurassic World is absolutely the best sequel yet to the 1993 Jurassic Park, which is one of the least-impressive compliments you can pay to a record-setting summer blockbuster. We should not feel obliged to mark it down as a strength when a movie can be confidently declared to be better than not just 1997’s enervating […]
When horror came back to American cinema in a big way in the 1950s, it was after receiving a face-lift: gone were creaky Mitteleuropean castles and villages, banished were old dark houses, and even the outright lifts of Expressionist aesthetic techniques were mostly snuffed out (though a genre that gets so much mileage from a […]
A second review requested by Andrew Johnson, with thanks for contributing twice to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Once upon a time there was a 24-year-old named Steven Spielberg, who wanted to make movies. Not to grow up into one of the most marketable brand-name producers in the history of the medium; […]
The first two-and-a-half decades of feature-length American horror cinema can be crudely divided into two flavors: the movies made by Universal Pictures, and everything else. It was Universal who, in the 1920s, cracked the code of making literary adaptations that were longer on spooky atmosphere than prestige; it was Universal who finally pulled the trigger […]
Last time around, I alluded in a vague way to the wild and woolly world of Poverty Row, the scuffed-up ugly underbelly of the American filmmaking industry in the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s. The name refers to an inexhaustible supply of short-lived and occasionally durable B-picture firms that latched onto the most profitable genres that […]
At its best, the 2015 Poltergeist is a beat-for-beat (but only sometimes shot-for-shot) retread of the 1982 Poltergeist, with Jared Harris substituting for Zelda Rubinstein. And I love Jared Harris, and I’m never sad to see him in a movie, but Zelda Rubinstein was the best part of the original movie. So at its best, […]
A review requested by Liz, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. The body of work created by the filmmaking team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (credited equally as writers, directors, and producers, though it’s generally understood that Powell was more the director, while Pressburger was more the […]
