How does one try to summarise 1999 with one review of one movie? It was arguably (by which I mean “almost certainly, but let’s not be smug know-it-all dicks about it”) the single most transformative year of American filmmaking after the collapse of the New Hollywood Cinema. A stunning number of major filmmakers made some […]
The pitch for Gloria from virtually every angle has always been some variant on “yada yada, but Paulina García is amazing“. And boy, is she ever. Few actors are ever called upon to support an entire feature-length film with such totality – there is, I think, a grand total of one shot in which she […]
Winner of the Silver Hugo for Best CinematographyScreens at CIFF: 10/14 & 10/16 & 10/22World premiere: 7 September, 2014, Toronto International Film Festival 1001 Grams is, first and foremost, a precious movie. It has a darling little shadowbox of a plot in which heightened characters move through immaculately quirky setpieces on their way to a […]
Cinema history, as an intellectual pursuit, is not nearly as old as cinema itself. In different countries, the rise of a semi-professional class of cineastes emerged through different processes at different time, and in America it began in the 1960s as a response to ideas filtering in from France, and the French critic/directors of the […]
The very best thing that ever happened to Magic in the Moonlight is that writer-director Woody Allen made The Curse of the Jade Scorpion prior to it. The two films resemble each other in multiple ways: they’re both set just outside the Great Depression (Jade Scorpion in New York in 1940, Magic in 1928 in […]
What If they made another movie about extravagantly quirky urban white twentysomethings? What if it took place in a loving version of Toronto that somehow still felt exactly like Brooklyn in every other movie in living memory about the same subpopulation? What if it starred Harry Potter, all growed up and able to drink beer, […]
There’s no such thing as a universal opinion, of course, and we wouldn’t want there to be. Even so, I don’t think anyone would seriously call my tastes or judgment into question if I propose that Cary Grant was absolutely the suavest motherfucker in the history of cinema. So it is with no little bit […]
Melodramas, neo-Westerns, proto-indies, social commentary and all are fun, but I couldn’t leave the 1950s behind without touching on that decade’s single most lasting contribution, not just to movies but to Western civilisation generally. The ’50s, you see, were the decade when Teen Culture truly came into existence, not just in the sense of teenagers […]
The Hollywood Century project has been primarily concerned with charting the history of the major Hollywood studios, but it has also been an attempt to track the evolution of American filmmaking over a one-hundred year period, and as we make our way through the ’50s, we have come across one of the truly seismic events […]
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: Edge of Tomorrow uses a science fiction war as backdrop to a story of a man who relives the […]
The recent conversation about the state of the romcom in the 2010s – is it dead or dying? is it revivable? why do people hate laughter and love – amuses me to no end, because it misses the most important part of all: the golden age of romantic comedy was over before most of the […]
The story goes that the extraordinary popularity of musicals in the 1930s in America was a direct result of the Great Depression: the fantasy and spectacle and charm of the genre was an easy way to stay distracted for an hour or two of joy in the face of widespread economic suffering. Another story goes […]
