For anyone with much investment in Stanley Kubrick as a cinematic stylist – and it’s hard to imagine anyone being significantly fond of him as a director without having a lot of specific affection for the surface-level elements of his style – his sophomore feature, 1955’s Killer’s Kiss, is somewhat of an ideal case study. […]
We’re not so far past Valentine’s Day that I can’t share with you what I think to be one of the great, specifically American love stories ever put to film, a sex-soaked film noir from either 1949 or 1950, depending on your source. Customarily known nowadays as Gun Crazy, it went through most of its […]
The obvious thing is to talk about Blade Runner as though it were nothing but an exercise in style for style’s sake on the part of director Ridley Scott; and while we prefer to do what is not obvious here, even when it means making the sort of contortions of logic and expression that really […]
The controversy surrounding Basic Instinct when it was new was big enough that even I, as a ten-year-old, had some sense of it: gay activists protesting, Sharon Stone declaiming the film’s director as having photographed her genitalia without permission, Joe Eszterhas, the screenwriter, receiving an unfathomable payday – and that last bit, I think, is […]
When the Walt Disney Company fell under the control of Michael Eisner and company in the 1980s, one of the biggest changes they made to corporate culture – and this is, in hindsight, so utterly self-evident that it hardly bears me saying it – was a new emphasis on movies that would make lots of […]
No film by the chameleon-like director Olivier Assayas met with as much brutal misunderstanding – at least, in the United States; I cannot speak to its reception in Europe – as 2002’s demonlover, a stupendously intelligent assault on globalism, e-commerce, the media, corporate culture – oh, and violent pornography, although insofar as the movie has […]
Given how sequel-mad Universal studios was in the wake of 1939’s Son of Frankenstein, cranking out two Frankensteins, one of which was also a Wolf Man, a whole carload of mummy pictures, and hell, even a few Invisible Man follow-ups, it seems almost absurd that it took until 1943 to finally produce a second sequel […]
For a grimy crime B-film released in 1948 to no more fanfare than any other film noir programmer, He Walked by Night has quite a remarkable family tree. Without this film and its docudrama-style boot- on-the ground approach to storytelling, which so impressed co-star Jack Webb, there would of a certainty be no Dragnet, and […]
Once upon a time, Frank Miller was among the finest writers in the comics medium; that would be right around 1986, when The Dark Knight Returns was published for the first time, revolutionising the world of superhero literature. In the years that follow, Miller started to slide a bit into weaker and weaker stories, then […]
After directing three of the finest American films of the decade and one extraordinarily close near-miss, Clint Eastwood was probably due for a stumble. And that’s really all that I think Changeling is, a stumble, and not even a bad one: there’s quite a lot to love about Eastwood’s treatment of the grim true story […]
Idiots and Angels is the latest feature by animator Bill Plympton (whose newest short, “Hot Dog”, was very recently reviewed on this blog), and like all of his work, it’s clearly and exasperatingly the work of an auteur: the great conundrum of Plympton’s work is that half of the animation buffs who make up essentially […]
I was very excited to see what writer-director David Mamet had in store for us in Redbelt, his first film to be released after he stopped being a brain-dead liberal. Would it be an impassioned defense of privatized health care? A serious look at the need to bomb all Arabs into the Stone Age to […]
