Lightyear, the 26th feature film produced by Pixar Animation studios and easily the worst one that has no talking cars in it, opens with two title cards relaying the following information: “In 1995, a boy named Andy got a Buzz Lightyear toy for his birthday. It was from his favorite movie. This is that movie.” […]
Every mainstream movie is commercial product, of course, and plenty of the less-mainstream ones as well. But it’s been a good long bit since I’ve been left as incapable of ignoring that fact as I am with PAW Patrol: The Movie, a throwback to a simpler time in children’s animation when cartoons were not merely […]
For what would prove to be the final film of his self-imposed exile in West Germany, Ingmar Bergman wanted to finally honor the cinema of his host country, rather than keep making quasi-Swedish chamber dramas as if nothing had changed but the address of his studio. And indeed, that is very much what he ended […]
Intermittently 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: in Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, Dwayne Johnson plays a character who was introduced as a villain in […]
I think it’s telling that The Curse of La Llorona takes place in the Conjuring Universe, which is right now the second-strongest brand-name in cinematic horror after Jordan Peele, and the advertising campaign put not one molecule of energy into promoting that fact. It’s not, like, a secret. There’s no astonishing duhn-duhn-duhhnnn! twist where we […]
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: to hear the marketing tell it, you’d think that Wonder Woman was the very first major comic book movie […]
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: Ridley Scott takes us to the prehistory of his 1979 masterpiece Alien with a certain Alien: Covenant. Not the […]
So, Kong: Skull Island isn’t “bad”, exactly. I don’t know, is it bad? It’s kind of bad. But the thing is, it wants to do one thing, and it does it, the thing promised right there in the title. Not “Kong” – this is closer to the dullest screen depiction of the giant ape Kong […]
“The Empire Strikes Back is the darkest Star Wars film”, they say; “the Rebellion loses everything, Luke has an existential crisis, Han is gone”. Or, “Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith is the darkest Star Wars“, the say; “the whole galaxy is overrun by evil, the very flesh is burned off of […]
What we all know – and like most things we all know, it’s a simplification, but in this case not such an extreme nor indefensible one – is that George Lucas stuck the Ewoks into Return of the Jedi to sell toys. “Warrior teddy bears” isn’t the most all-time slam-dunk moneymaking idea, to be sure, […]
This review is based on the most commonly-available copy recorded from the broadcast by the CBS affiliate in Baltimore, MD, with all commercial breaks intact. When we began our little retrospective of the Star Wars franchise, I asked you to do something unfathomably difficult, and pretend that it was 1977, and you just saw Star […]
That there are two animated films in the summer of 2013 which both feature a creature that just wants to race, doggone it, no matter what institutional bias he faces from the powers-that-be because he belongs to the wrong species, and when he eventually manages to make it into the big show, he ends up […]