Ingmar Bergman was best-known in most of the world as a film director and writer; in his native Sweden, he was as well-known, if not better, as a theater director. He mostly kept these worlds separate: a few of his films have a distinctly theatrical sensibility, and at least one of his theatrical productions was […]
It’s enormously easy to imagine a version of the 2007 killer crocodile movie Black Water that’s considerably worse. That’s because it would basically be the 2003 killer shark movie Open Water, a much-hyped movie that wasn’t particularly good, but did create a model for ultra-low-budget thrillers set in one location with just a couple of […]
No reviewer of the 1958 MGM musical Gigi will ever come up with a better lede paragraph than the one Bosley Crowther wrote for his review in The New York Times, in which he affects modest shock at the astonishing list of coincidences between the film and a recent Broadway, before drily ending with the […]
Also check out my review of the Italian cut It is a common observation and an accurate one that independent Pittsburgh-based director George A. Romero invented the modern zombie film more or less entirely out of thin air with 1968’s Night of the Living Dead. But I think the reason that the zombie film turned […]
To claim that Re-Animator, a faultless hybrid of no-holds-barred splatterpunk horror and pitch-black comedy from 1985, is the best movie ever drawn from the writing of H.P. Lovecraft is to merely claim the offensively obvious. It doesn’t take very much at all to be one of the best Lovecraft adaptations (he’s a good candidate for […]
It is difficult to avoid overvaluing 1994’s Street Fighter is. Okay, it’s actually very easy to avoid that, since Street Fighter is a massive failure, the grotesque mutant child of a calamitous shoot. You know all the stories about movies like Casablanca or Jaws, where the production history is just one catastrophe after another, they […]
I literally cannot imagine a world where The Seventh Seal didn’t exist. It is, without a trace of hyperbole, one of the works that defines its medium. That there is a thing called “the art film”; that we can, without embarrassment, treat cinema as something that serious intellectuals can and should grapple with; that there […]
