The original sin of the anthology film is that no matter how tightly controlled it is, no matter how thematically tight, and no matter how aesthetically consistent, there’s always going to be a segment that isn’t as good as the others, and it’s going to feel like it showed up in the worst possible place […]
V/H/S/2 begins with a scene of a seedy private eye (Lawrence Michael Levine) recording two people about to have sex in a hotel room. This event does not inform anything in the rest of the movie; it doesn’t even introduce us to the character of the P.I., who’ll be more formally set-up in the very […]
There’s an insurmountable argument to be made that, most of a year later, there’s no merit to kicking Movie 43 anymore. On the other hand, writing shell-shocked, visceral pans of fucking dreadful movies is fun, and it’s Christmas Day. So here’s my present to myself, and hopefully to you as well, my readers. God bless […]
The found footage horror movie, birthed by 1999’s The Blair Witch Project and thrust into the big time by 2008’s Cloverfield, burned itself out rather quickly, as will happen to a genre so cheap that you need neither a good idea nor talent to whip together something which enough damn fools will trudge out to […]
First, the petty, niggling point: by the strictest definition, Belle’s Magical World and Beauty and the Beast: Belle’s Magical World are two different features. Initially, the second sequel – if that’s even the right word – to the luminous Disney classic Beauty and the Beast was released under the shorter of its two titles on […]
The last time Woody Allen made more than one genuinely great movies right in a row was in 1994 (if we want to press a point and allow the intermittently brilliant, sometimes strident Deconstructing Harry as great, it jumps to 1997), and thus it must follow, as night the day, that his next project after […]
As I mentioned, the third of the AIP/Roger Corman Poe movies, Premature Burial, was something of a failure – not a flop, for it’s hard for a movie produced as cheaply as even the costliest AIP picture to “flop” – and for the fourth movie in the cycle, the second released in 1962, a course-correction […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/9 World Premiere: 23-26 August, 2010, Japanese TV The feature being marketed on the festival circuit as Kaidan – Horror Classics began life as a television sereis that aired in Japan in August, 2010. The premise is straightforward enough: four works of paranormal fiction by the masters of the genre, each adapted […]
The official line is that the Disney Renaissance ended with Tarzan in the summer of 1999, for that film was the last outstanding financial success in string of hits; it was also the last $100 million Disney picture for a while; and it is implied often though not always stated outright that Tarzan was also […]
It is readily observed that there were six package films produced by the Disney Studios from 1942 to 1949, a desperate cost-saving measure in the years during and immediately following World War II. Not so obvious is the fact that these six films can be easily broken into three pairs: two Latin American goodwill efforts, […]
I think it might be really fun to bring one of these Disney reviews in under 2000 words again, so I’m going to skip the history lesson this time, except to reiterate what happened to the Disney Studios in the post-war ’40s: Walt Disney was inattentive, they were running out of money, and the package […]
It’s all on display right there in the title: Fun and Fancy Free. I do not know but that I catch a slight whisper of defiant desperation in those words, but then, Make Mine Music is still fresh in my memory, and that is enough to make it clear that things at Disney were not […]
