“These two unrelated movies constitute a trend” is not by any stretch of the imagine my favorite bad habit in film criticism. Yet it seems awfully hard not to notice that December 2021 has borne witness to two different movies made by A-list Oscar-winning directors that are both technically new adaptations of non-movie media, but […]
The new film adaptation of the 1957 stage musical West Side Story has an exceptionally high “why did you feel the need to make this” bar to clear. Because it’s also, in the public imagination if not in the most precisely literal sense, a remake of the 1961 film musical West Side Story, one of […]
Intermittently throughout the 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 a major new release. This week: David Lowery and A24 have brought us a moody art-film version of most beloved of 14th Century romances in the form […]
I’m honestly quite glad I was never much of a fan of Tom and Jerry, the cat-and-mouse slapstick cartoon series started by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera in 1940. Because if I was, I can only imagine how much more disgusted I would be by what has happened to the characters and the franchise since […]
“What if we did a horror movie version of Fantasy Island?” is an idea that makes a certain kind of cock-eyed sense. The TV series in question, which ran from 1977-1984, is about an island in the Pacific where a mysterious man named Mr. Roarke allows visitors to experience their deepest fantasies come to life. […]
I have one thing about Disney’s new live-action Mulan that makes me extremely happy: it’s not a mindless shot-for-shot remake of the 1998 animated film, and in this respect is considerably less irksome than the 2017 Beauty and the Beast and the 2019 Aladdin and The Lion King, the other remakes of films from the […]
We can learn a great deal about the 2013 remake of the 1978 horror film Patrick simply by looking at where it came from. Director Mark Hartley was, by training, a documentary filmmaker, and the ’13 Patrick was his first narrative feature. That doesn’t tell us much by itself – lots of documentarians make the […]
One is practically required by law to start any review of the 1999 version of The Haunting by negatively comparing it to the 1963 version of The Haunting, and how dare I do otherwise. The Haunting ’63 is one of horror’s all-time highest water marks, an immaculate piece of visual storytelling on top of being […]
Oh, how very clearly I remember looking forward to The Ladykillers, back in the first few months of 2004! After being extremely disappointed in Intolerable Cruelty the previous fall, it felt like this was going to see the Coen brothers right the ship: it didn’t exude the same unengaged aura of “we had a gap […]
51 years after the premiere of the animated series Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! on television, I can absolutely see where the idea of using a reboot of that series to launch a Hanna-Barbera Cinematic Universe makes business sense. That’s three or even four completely distinct generations that have grown up with Scooby-Doo, the one Hanna-Barbera […]
Lady and the Tramp was the fifth, count ’em, fifth film released by the Walt Disney Company in 2019 that was more or less a redo of one of their classic animated features done up in some ungainly combination of live-action videography and CGI, following Dumbo, Aladdin, The Lion King, and Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, […]
I admit, I’m impressed Dolittle exists. When a studio spends $175 million (that they’re willing to report in public!) on a production, you expect that there’s going to be some level of soulless quality control involved: this will be buffed and clipped sanded into a flavorless blob, but by God it will not be terrible. […]
