To begin with, there’s no getting around it: The Grandmaster was massively fucked with on its way to U.S. theaters. Is it clearly the case that the changes that director Wong Kar-wai executed under the watchful eye of chop-happy impresario Harvey Weinstein make the film worse? Search me. But it’s just not possible to watch […]
Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: there has not been one second since the title was announced that I have felt anything but dull rage […]
When Kung Fu Panda came out three years ago, it was greeted with a special kind of enthusiasm beyond what it altogether deserved: for this was not just a perfectly fun talking animal comedy, it was the film that finally, after so many years, proved that DreamWorks Animation could make a good movie (or, if […]
One would assume that an international film star with the appeal and cult of Jackie Chan would not have much if any trouble getting his way; and yet the path leading to Little Big Soldier, which premiered in Asia in the winter of 2010 and has yet to secure a proper release across most of […]
Like a lot of other filmmakers with a good visual sense and apparent no idea how to structure a story or write dialogue, M. Night Shyamalan has been the subject of much “if only he’d direct someone else’s screenplay!” conjecture since his career started tanking in earnest with 2004’s The Village (which at the time […]
First principles: two hours and twenty minutes is a fucking unreasonable running time for a kids’ martial arts film. But that is exactly the running time of the new remake of The Karate Kid, which finds Will and Jada Pinkett Smith winning the Best Parents of the Year award, having bought their son Jaden his […]
I know nothing about the much-loved manga series Dragon Ball, and my exposure to the two anime series derived from that manga consists of, at best, some three or four episodes. I am, that is to say, no expert in the field of Dragon Ball. However, I like to think that I am, if not […]
You’d expect one thing out of a movie with the words “street” and “fighter” in the title, and one of the greatest failures of Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li is how very little fighting actually goes on in its modestly convoluted plot about a young woman getting her revenge on a murderous Irish real-estate […]
In 1994, Wong Kar-wai made a film called Ashes of Time: a movie of much greater budget than he’d ever been given before, in a genre (wuxia, martial arts) previously unknown to him, with a cast comprising some of the biggest names in Hong Kong cinema at the time. The project became an infamous boondoggle, […]
Oh, how I’m going to hell for that post title. The final vampire picture produced by Hammer Film Productions saw the studio going out with neither a bang nor a whimper, but a comic SPROING!!! noise. At least that is the sound it makes in my head, because wow is The Legend of the 7 […]
Whatever else may be said of Kung Fu Panda, I know this much is true: it is by far the most visually appealing film yet released by DreamWorks Animation. They’re certainly not in the same league as the masters of the universe over at Pixar, but they’ve never been closer; but maybe at about the […]
When Zhang Yimou’s Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles was released this summer, you could practically hear the sigh of relief from cinephiles like myself: at last, “our” Zhang was back, the Zhang who made tiny small scale dramas of domesticity and relative intimacy, the Zhang seemingly in abeyance after a brace of colossal wuxia […]
