Author’s note, January 2017: I used to have you might call a bug up my butt about this franchise. Let’s say that although I stand by this review, I don’t actually agree with it. I do not suppose that any of my habitual readers were anxious for me to watch and review Resident Evil: Afterlife, […]
The conventional wisdom is that The Matrix Revolutions, the last of its trilogy, is weaker than its immediate forebear, The Matrix Reloaded, regardless of whether either of them is “good”; and I am proud to break with this convention. Not because I think that Revolutions is really good, or a successful return to the level […]
Many, many people love The Matrix. I am not one of them – I enjoy it well enough, but it doesn’t loom very large in my memory – nor was I in 2003, which is where our story begins. For it was in that year that two of the most heavily-anticipated movies of the 2000s […]
2012 is shaping up to be a banner year for Event Movies, and thank God for it – great cinema is nice and all, but there’s something to be said for the sort of ginormous popular hit that everybody’s excited to see and excited after they see it, and mostly people like it even if […]
The word of the day, boys and girls, is “ambivalent”. As in, “I feel extremely ambivalent towards Bellflower, because Bellfower is extremely ambivalent about its two main characters.” Not in the good way.* One gets the feeling – anyway, I got the feeling, and it does seem that Bellflower is something of a Rosarch test […]
When last we saw director Scott Stewart and actor Paul Bettany collaborating, it was on a religious-themed action/horror hybrid that had virtually nothing to do with anything resembling coherent real-world theology, and it involved undead monsters that were a damn sight cooler than the insipid movie they found themselves inhabiting; it was called Legion. Now […]
Every Sunday 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: though Christopher Nolan proves again with Inception that he’s one of the most honorable directors in the field of […]
Years before he became arguably the most important director of feature-length animated films in the history of cinema, Miyazaki Hayao was an employee of Toei Animation, working as an animator, concept artist, and story man. That’s actually under-selling it quite a lot: he was one of the animators and concept artists at Toei, something of […]
Some words on the criteria of judging movies: In praising a meritorious film, there are a lot of words that we can bandy about, and while ultimately all of them mean something similar, i.e. “Watching this movie was an experience that made me feel like I had spent time well and was better for for […]
Sometimes DI – digital intermediate, that is, the computer-aided manipulation of film to alter the color balance and saturation of the footage – works pretty well. And sometimes, you see a movie that is so aggressively, stupidly DI’d that you’re just like, “Fuck me, that is a lot of DI.” Okay, so you probably do […]
Held back from an intended 2008 Oscar season release for the usual vague “editing” reasons, director John Hillcoat and writer Joe Penhall’s adaptation of the highly-fêted Cormac McCarthy novel The Road has finally revealed itself to the world, and as expected, “editing” turns out to be a code word for “we tried really hard to […]
