There is a stat that I find somehow totally unexpected, even though I’d have guessed it right if you asked me beforehand: the highest-grossing baseball movie in history is A League of Their Own, the story of the first season of the short-lived All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, founded during World War II as a […]
War is violent. Did you know? Was this something that you might have guessed at, even in your most wild fantasies? Because the new World War II movie Fury seems to have run out of ideas above and beyond “war is violent”, though it makes up for that by suggesting that war was really really […]
The dominant aesthetic of commercial American filmmaking in the 1960s was that of unbridled size. Enormous action films with star-studded casts, like The Great Escape; sprawling ensemble comedies like The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming; grandiose historical epics like Doctor Zhivago. And, of course, the musicals. There’s never been anything quite like a […]
There’s no such thing as a universal opinion, of course, and we wouldn’t want there to be. Even so, I don’t think anyone would seriously call my tastes or judgment into question if I propose that Cary Grant was absolutely the suavest motherfucker in the history of cinema. So it is with no little bit […]
I do not know – and I suppose if I really wanted to know, I could find out – what the stops are along the history of “realistic” war films; what caused people to start making movies in which combat was a joyless, dispiriting slog full of mortal dread and not a noble calling that […]
Even by the standards of a movie franchise whose immediate prior entry featured an 80-meter dinosaur spitting beams of nuclear energy at a giant carnivorous rose that was cloned from the dinosaur’s own DNA, the 1991 film Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah is really peculiar. Not, entirely, peculiar and bad. And I do not regard as […]
30 November, 1993, represents the dividing point in the career of director Steven Spielberg. Prior to this, he was primarily a director of ebullient, exhilarating popcorn movies; since then, he has primarily been a director of largely serious dramas, with even his genre films tending to be more about investigating society than providing easy thrills. […]
Very rarely, we’re given the great and deep privilege of seeing a movie that reaffirms our collective humanity and opens us to worlds of joy and hope and pain and fear and love that we never knew existed. Movies that are emotional and spiritual journeys as much as they are a collection of images strung […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/17 & 10/18 & 10/19World premiere: 3 July, 2013, Karlovy Vary Film Festival Special Mention by the Festival jury for Molnár Piroska Szász János’s The Notebook is an immensely handsome movie, and it is a movie about two children surviving World War II at the expense of their childlike innocence, and if […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/13 World premiere: 19 May, 2013, Cannes International Film Festival There is a great deal to be said about The Last of the Unjust, and since it is three hours and 38 minutes long, this is a good thing – if one invested that kind of time in watching a movie and […]
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 film fan will have weird little side notes to their life of cinephilia, and here’s one of mine: before finally watching it to write this review, I’ve been waiting to see Claude Lelouch’s free adaptation of Les Misérables from 1995 for longer than any other movie ever. I first heard about it during its […]
