Technically, 1985’s Red Sonja, one of the key films in the disintegration of the sword & sorcery genre, is not at all a Conan the Barbarian film. And technically, it isn’t based on the writing of Robert E. Howard, Conan’s creator. The character of Red Sonja in fact made her debut in 1973, in the […]
Two important facts: one is that Conan the Barbarian made a whole lot of money in 1982, and kicked off a new subgenre, the sword & sorcery film, that was for a few years the genre film of choice in English-speaking parts; the other is that Conan the Barbarian was produced under the aegis of […]
Every Sunday 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: the remake of Conan the Barbarian introduces a new generation to the pop hero of Weird Tales, one of […]
Sergio Leone received onscreen credit for directing only seven features, and of that number, five are Westerns. We’ll never know exactly what it was that drove the man to focus so relentlessly on one single genre, but one of the reasons, surely, was that he was really damn good at it. Right out of the […]
Being the first in a retrospective series celebrating the work of legendary Italian genre film director Sergio Leone The name of politician and author Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton is but poorly remembered now, though he was once one of the most popular English-language novelists in the world in his heyday, back in the first half of […]
Every Sunday 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: eight years after making pirates the toast of pop-culture once more, Johnny Depp and friends are back to try […]
Every Sunday 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: Thor isn’t just the latest in a long (so long…) line of comic book adaptations, it’s also one of […]
A few years ago, a friend and I got in a bit of an argument: was David Gordon Green’s third feature, Undertow, up to the standards set by his first two films? Neither of us being a moron, we both agreed that George Washington was a consummate achievement, the kind of once-in-a-generation first feature, but […]
It is not a surprise that the first new movie of 2011 should be a bad one – good movies do not premiere in January unless it is by accident – nor a surprise that the particular movie to hold that honor, Season of the Witch, should specifically be bad, whenever it was released (as […]
When Disney elected to cease paying for Walden Media’s adaptations of C.S. Lewis’s seven-volume Chronicles of Narnia, following the stilted box-office performance of The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian in 2008, it looked for a little while that everybody’s favorite watered-down Christian apologetic series would peter out barely a quarter of the way through. Then […]
The idea of a Studio Ghibli adaptation of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea books predates the existence of Studio Ghibli itself, as well of three of the (so far) six novels in the series. In the early 1980s, long before he’d gained any fame whatsoever in the West, the relatively green anime director Miyazaki Hayao […]
If you absolutely must see a new-release movie this weekend, your choice is between Sex and the City 2, a reductive and insulting view of femininity-as-commodity laced with a stunning undercurrent of reflexive American cultural superiority that creaks along for 146 unending minutes; or you can see something bad. Okay, fair is fair, I’d be […]
