Making a sequel that significantly improves on a strong original is a feat that few enough filmmakers have ever achieved; asking those filmmakers to try their luck by doing the same thing twice in a row is clearly beyond reason. So it’s hardly a slight against Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome that it fails at the […]
Mad Max 2 is, maybe, the perfect sequel. And if you’ll let me pause on that very ebullient sentiment, a note on usage. The film is known by that title everywhere in the world except for North America; the original Mad Max had received a virtually invisible release in 1980, the victim of immensely poor […]
There’s no way around it: Mad Max is an astonishingly impressive movie. It was made for pocket change by a bunch of of amateurs: director and co-writer George Miller was a medical doctor, of all things, before he and producer partner Byron Kennedy made the short Violence in the Cinema, Part 1. And that was […]
A review requested by Brian Malbon, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Two things at least can be confidently stated about Meet the Feebles: it’s a movie that goes to great lengths to be the most fully-expressed version of itself possible; and Peter Jackson’s career would have been […]
Talking about Predestination without confidently, fearlessly giving away plot points that shouldn’t be given away is enormously hard. The best thing would be to go in totally cold, not even knowing what short story it’s based on (having read the story – it is not at all obscure, though calling it “well-known” might be a […]
In 1977, 27-year-old Robyn Davidson walked from Alice Springs, Australia, to the west coast of that country, a 2700-kilometer hike primarily through desert that took nine months. The trip was financed by National Geographic out of the United States, which published an article written by Davidson the year following her journey, and filmmakers have been […]
And thus does one of the most ill-considered experiments in franchise extension end precisely the way it was bound to end. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, the grand finale of director Peter Jackson’s three-part adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1937 children’s novel, feels like a weirdly-shaped movie fragment and not a movie at […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/10 & 10/21World premiere: 17 January, 2014, Sundance Film Festival The business of being a fan of horror movies is a frustrating and thankless one, since they are so especially prone to being bad, but ever so often one comes along that you can stand up and cheer and point at and […]
There’s something especially annoying about a movie that veers between mostly good and very good for its entire running time, only to complete puke itself apart in the last few minutes. I present to you The Rover, writer-director David Michôd’s sophomore feature after his impressive but in many ways frustratingly commonplace crime thriller Animal Kingdom. […]
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: we have two sequels coming out in one weekend to films that had no right to be as great […]
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug had every reason on Earth to be clearly and significantly better than The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, but it’s much closer to being a dead heat. This ends up being far, far more depressing than An Unexpected Journey was in isolation, for there was still hope after that movie. […]
The very best thing I can think to say about The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is this: it has left me with absolutely no reason to assume that 2013’s The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is going to be half as much of a slog. If nothing else, that sequel’s title, in relation to the […]
