Now that we’ve hit film #3, and given that the worldwide box office take so far makes it seem somewhat unlikely that film #4 is in the offing, we are able to speak of the “Kung Fu Panda Trilogy”. And as far as I’m concerned, we are able to speak of it in especially fond […]
A review requested by Grace C, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Bad comedies, as I’ve had cause to mention before, are the very worst, because you can laugh at bad action or melodrama or horror. But the definition of a bad comedy is that it’s not funny, […]
A review series requested by a donor who wishes to remain anonymous, with thanks for multiple contributions to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. In October, 2013, just a smidgen more than one year after the two-part recap movie hit Japanese theaters, along came the first new material in the movie trilogy: Puella […]
A review series requested by a donor who wishes to remain anonymous, with thanks for multiple contributions to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Released one week after the first film, Puella Magi Madoka Magica: The Movie – Eternal is a much looser concoction. Beginnings reduces eight episodes to 130 minutes; Eternal reduces […]
A review series requested by a donor who wishes to remain anonymous, with thanks for multiple contributions to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. The 2012 film titled [deep breath] Puella Magi Madoka Magica: The Movie – Beginnings is not, to begin with, a “movie based on a TV show” in the sense […]
My instinct to say of Hail, Caesar! that you will love it if you fall into the enormously specific niche of people who adore Studio Era Hollywood but are still totally okay with making fun of it, and also consider themselves somewhere firmly entrenched in the Leftist-Socialist-Marxist end of the spectrum but are still totally […]
The list of great documentaries about the political process is not a long one, but its highlights are some true all-time masterpieces: Robert Drew’s Primary, from 1960; D.A. Pennebaker & Chris Hegedus’s The War Room, from 1993. To this rarefied company we must now certainly add Camilla Nielsson’s Democrats, an absolute miracle of a film […]
Another year, another multi-hour Frederick Wiseman epic: and I actually quite liked In Jackson Heights, so forgive me for sounding a bit dismissive. But it comes in a hair short of his last two films, lacking the precision of National Gallery‘s deceptively dense argument, or the sheer society-encompassing grandeur of At Berkeley, still the best […]
Apparently, all it takes to get a Best Documentary Feature nomination at the Oscars is to stop at “we’ve got the footage!” without advancing to the necessary step of “we’ve formulated an argument with our footage!”, because now we come along to Cartel Land, a film that had every excuse to be one of the […]
Maidan exists. This is the reality that Winter on Fire, Netflix’s Oscar-nominated documentary about the February, 2014 revolution in Ukraine, has to contend with and never manages to overcome. It’s an unfair thing to demand of any film that it has to live up to the standard of some other specific film, I concede, and […]
There is a tradition in documentary filmmaking, I do not know what we should call it: the work of archivist-interviewers, perhaps. Even if you have no idea what I’m talking about, you’ve seen it: there are talking heads who explain stuff, and there is vintage footage of the stuff they’re explaining, and sometimes they’re talking […]
