This review is based on the extended cut available on the initial DVD release of the film, 3 minutes longer than the original theatrical cut and lacking some CGI embellishments made to the later home video editions. I come to bury the Star Wars prequels, really I do. But that’s easy and obvious, and with […]
It’s not enough to claim, as I was almost content to do, that The Peanuts Movie shows up as a very good example of how to do modernisation right. Upgrading Charles Schulz’s achingly melancholic comic strip that ran from 1950 to 2000, and the considerably less melancholic but sometimes nearly as iconic TV specials that […]
This review is based on the “Despecialized Edition” prepared by fan editor Harmy, something akin to the original 1983 release. It is very nearly almost claimed that Return of the Jedi is the weakest film of the original Star Wars trilogy, and this is absolutely true. The specific reasons for this, and how many of […]
This review is based upon the “Despecialized Edition” prepared by fan editor Harmy, something akin to the original 1980 version. Or, an original version, anyway; this film appeared in multiple cuts even during its initial release. Has any movie sequel ever had such widespread impossible expectations as The Empire Strikes Back? Has any movie sequel […]
A guide to all things Bond at Alternate Ending. Directed by Sam Mendes Written by John Logan and Neal Purvis & Robert Wade and Jez Butterworth Premiered 26 October, 2015 PRE-TITLE SEQUENCE The time has come to acknowledge that, notwithstanding the hellish editing in the car chase that opens Quantum of Solace, the Daniel Craig […]
A review requested by Anna D, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Even without the benefit of years’ worth of hindsight, I think it’s fair to assume that history will judge What We Do in the Shadows to be a quintessential, time-stamped example of moviemaking in the mid-2010s. […]
In 1948, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello met Frankenstein (as well as the wolf man and Dracula, and point in fact, they don’t meet Frankenstein, just his monster), and two flagging brands were revived. One of those was Universal horror, which had completely flatlined after 1945, as part of a more general fading of big […]
The focus of this review being its subject’s position in the context of filmmaking in 1977, it is not based upon the series of “Special Edition” re-releases in theaters and on home video that have routinely happened since 1997. Instead, I take as my source material the “Despecialized Edition” reconstruction by fan editor Harmy of […]
The Universal horror movie is at heart a pre-WWII phenomenon; after The Wolf Man, released less than a week after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, the studio’s genre films would never rise above “decent enough”, and usually didn’t even hit that threshold, until they finally gave up making them in the middle of […]
I am about to make a patently unfair comparison, but the job of the reviewer is to be honest, and this has been my overriding feeling for the past couple of days: there’s ultimately nothing that The Martian does that 1995’s Apollo 13 and 2013’s Gravity didn’t already do. And they both did it better. […]
If we absolutely must have Biopics of Great Men™, the least we can hope for is that they all try as hard as Steve Jobs. It is a film that is not-great in many ways and actively broken in at least a couple, but as whipped together by screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (and oh my word, […]
