To begin with the only issue of any real importance: in the Netflix original movie The Christmas Chronicles: Part Two, Kurt Russell isn’t nearly as much pure, weightless fun in the role of Santa Claus as he was in 2018’s The Christmas Chronicles. This is in part, of course, because The Christmas Chronicles: Part Two […]
Your Princess is In Another Castle 2018’s The Princess Switch is certainly one of the more delightful confections birthed from Netflix’s attempts to swoop in on the Hallmark Channel’s Christmas presence, but Vanessa Hudgens + high concept Christmas movie isn’t always a surefire hit machine, as last year’s The Knight Before Christmas taught us. Well, […]
I don’t usually like to play this game, but if Unhinged isn’t the perfect film to embody the 2020 movie year, I don’t know what. First, there’s what it “is”: a script, by Carl Ellsworth (who was knocking out mediocre thrillers at a nice clip in the late 2000s, and then suddenly went completely dark […]
It has been nine years since director Gavin O’Connor made his last sports movie, the manfully sad “estranged brothers coping with their father’s alcholism” epic Warrior, but he still feels (to me, anyway) first and foremost like a sports movie director. This is at least in part because those nine years haven’t been full of […]
In the summer of 2003, documentary filmmaker Marie Nyreröd interviewed Ingmar Bergman in his home on the island of Fårö, in the process of making three one-hour documentaries about his life and work that aired on Swedish television the following year. At the same time, she recorded several short conversations with him, staged in his […]
Of all the colorful eccentrics that Werner Herzog has collected over his years of making documentaries about interesting people doing interesting things in interesting places, Clive Oppenheimer is among the least-colorful and least-eccentric. He’s a volcanologist at Cambridge, and it was in this capacity that he was doing fieldwork on Antarctic volcanoes when Herzog traveled […]
It’s hard to imagine a more profoundly unsentimental film director – or person – than Werner Herzog. Good ol’ Werner “The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they sing. They just screech in pain” Herzog. Or Werner “Life on our planet has been a constant series of […]
It is very often the case that film directors are terrible judges of their own art, both qualitatively (was this good or bad?) and descriptively (why does this work the way it does?). Not so with Ingmar Bergman. Almost without exception, when he said that one of his films was bad, it was bad, and […]
Werner Herzog has the kind of wide-ranging, long-lasting career that has very earned him at least enough benefit of the doubt that he will never, ever release a film that we can dismiss out of hand; I will not say that every new Herzog film is An Event (he releases too many for that to […]
There’s an inherent interest in watching a well-known director’s most unexpected, out-of-character work; what will this artist do with his skills when forced as far as possible outside of his comfort zone? And in the case of Ingmar Bergman, I think it’s more or less objectively true that the farthest he ever went afield from […]
Let Him Go has benefited to an unusual degree from the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic: it’s a film that almost certainly would have vanished without a ripple in any other circumstances other than being one of the handful of movies to get a large-sized theatrical release in the United States in the last four months of […]
Freaky Friday the 13th is such an obviously good idea that the only remotely surprising thing is that it took until 2020 for somebody to make it. And while the film in question has been released under the truncated title of Freaky – as I understand it, Paramount’s lawyers raised a bigger stink about Friday […]
