An earlier review of this film can be found here. A couple of years ago, I encountered the argument somewhere on the internet – I cannot find it again, alack, for it is a difficult thing to search for and not encounter porn – that long tracking shots are an inherently masculine act of cinematography. […]
On an artificial structure miles above the planet’s surface lives a population of idle, comfortable elites, enjoying the very finest technology and living in what you might as well call paradise. On the planet lives a miserable, ground-down population of working class grunts who slave to keep the elites’ world funtioning, without ever getting the […]
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: the genealogy of Pacific Rim rather obviously includes the kaiju eiga, Japan’s legendary giant monster movies spanning the last […]
There is literally zero reason for This Is the End to work as well as it does, and I say this as someone who has entire run out of anything except for sullen tolerance for at least three members of its six-man lead ensemble. For anybody that can hear the name “James Franco” and not […]
There’s nothing respectable at all about beating up on a 14-year-old in print, and it is the inalienable right of Jaden Smith to be 14 years old, something that most of us were at some point. But this leaves us at something of an impasse, because Smith is the chief problem with After Earth, a […]
There are only two kinds of viewers that I can imagine getting much enjoyment to speak of from Oblivion,and I am both of them. The first kind are those people who felt about director Joseph Kosinski’s 2010 debut TRON: Legacy, an unfathomably shallow demonstration of visual and aural style at its most computerised, that it […]
The battled-hardened fan of genre films learns quickly how to sift the good bits and pieces out of otherwise mediocre project; it is unlikely that one would else become a genre fan. And here’s an absolutely perfect example, Reign of Fire from 2002: there are some very fine individual elements, but is mostly bog-standard post-apocalypse […]
It is bizarre to think about nowadays, when Terry Gilliam’s name is practically a byword for stubborn, cultishly adored filmmaking that exists (barely) in defiance of commercial filmmaking norms, but there was a brief moment in the 1990s, when he was still making a movies at less than a once-in-a-generation rate, where it briefly looked […]
Stanley Kramer is a name that doesn’t get thrown around much these days, him being mostly forgotten by all but the dedicated, historically-minded cinephiles who are far likelier to respond to mention of the director-producer with an involuntary dry heave than with any kind of fondness. Yet there was a time, in the lifespan of […]
If I may steal from Tolstoy: competently-made movies are all alike, ambitiously messy movies are all ambitiously messy in their own way. Which is as much to say, Cloud Atlas is basically a disaster, but it’s a disaster that held me in a complete rapture for the entirety of its beyond-bloated 172-minute running time, and […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/15 & 10/16 & 10/19World premiere: 23 September, 2012, San Sebastian International Film Festival Part of me wants to eschew convention and not bother with any kind of synopsis for The Cleaner, the first feature by Peruvian writer-director Adriana Saba; and I will not indulge in this wish only because I am […]
The second attempt at adapting the classic British comic book antihero Judge Dredd to film, titled just Dredd, is a vastly better movie than the last attempt, 1995’s Sylvester Stallone vehicle Judge Dredd; but this is true of nearly all movies, which makes it a some pointless observation. Anyway, except for the name of the […]
