It’s not exactly the case that Empire of the Sun is Steven Spielberg’s most “divisive” movie, in any useful sense of that word (that’s almost certainly A.I. Artificial Intelligence). It’s something a little bit weirder than that: a movie that nobody really pointedly dislikes, unless they’re already suspicious of the director’s tendency towards sentimental manipulation, […]
And now we come to a weird one: the first direct-to-video Disney sequel that was released to theaters. Which, the quick-witted (or, in fact, the merely literate) will note is a contradiction; but Return to Never Land was in fact aiming for the same distribution fate as all the other Disney sequels produced by the […]
The year of my birth, 1981, was among the worst in cinema history, something I’ve only become strongly aware of in the last few weeks; yet it’s also the year that produced my second-favorite movie of all time.* And while it is undeniably the case that the world does not need another review of Raiders […]
Two things are immediately notable about Captain America: The First Avenger. One is that it has the most unnecessarily particular title of any comic book movie since X-Men Origins: Wolverine. The other is that it’s actually fun to watch, which shouldn’t be noteworthy at all, but in this age of darker, edgier comic book movies […]
After Days of Heaven, Terrence Malick vanished from the face of cinema. It was not, as is sometimes suggested, a deliberate retirement; he actively pursued at least a handful of projects in the years after his sophomore effort, including his creation-to-today epic Q and a biopic of Jerry Lee Lewis. Yet is there not something […]
Ellen Shapiro’s donation to the Carry On Campaign offered a choice: either her favorite movie of all time, or one of the worst movies she’d ever seen. Gratefully, I elect the former – there’s plenty of rarefied crap still to come, and her favorite happens to be a film I’ve always particularly enjoyed. “This is […]
Author’s note: when I first wrote this review, the film seemed so agreeably slight that it struck me as quite deranged that anybody had ever thought it could possibly win an Oscar for anything other than Colin Firth. Oops. Will revisit it one of these days, but for now, let’s enjoy the spectacle of a […]
When Walt Disney died of lung cancer in 1966, he left behind a company that had no idea how to function without him. Right down to the corporate name, Walt Disney Productions had largely been a cult of personality, and once that gargantuan figure was out of the picture, nobody behind the scenes or in […]
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: while it’s probably the case that no movie has ever matched The Expendables in assembling such a uniformly all-star […]
From among the Video Nasties During the Video Nasties era, movies of every stripe made it onto the DPP’s hit-list: slashers, gialli, art films, gory science fiction, and plenty besides. But two genres made a particular splash, and they’re the two genres that most reasonable people would likely consider the most appropriate candidates for a […]
Takahata Isao had directed a number of animated television series and a few feature films when he was brought in to the fold of the newly-formed Studio Ghibli in the mid-1980s. Ghibli had been largely formed through the efforts of producer Suzuki Toshio and director Miyazaki Hayao, a longtime collaborator of Takahata’s by that point; […]
Inglourious Basterds is a marvel, at least. Like it or hate it or worship it, I’m pretty sure that you’ve never seen anything like it. I know, because I have seen many films just like it, and I still haven’t seen anything like it. But that’s what makes Quentin Tarantino the man he is: there’s […]
