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: infamously, Lightyear is a film based on a different film that never existed but inspired a toy that was […]
The opening of For All Mankind, the extraordinary 1989 found footage documentary assembled by director Al Reinert and editor Susan Korda, serves as something of a thesis statement for the rest of the film’s 80 minutes. Over black, we hear two things: President John F. Kennedy declaiming passages from his wonderful 12 September 1962 speech […]
The best suspense sequence in any 2018 movie and the current front-runner for best suspense sequence in any 2019 movie depict the same event, and that event is notable primarily for having happened almost 50 years ago, and because everybody in the world already know how it ends. I refer to the 20 July, 1968 […]
On 20 July, 1969, the NASA Apollo 11 mission, commanded by Neil Armstrong, landed on the moon. Spoiler alert. But, I mean, it did, and that’s why we’re here for a movie like First Man to begin with. “First man to almost walk on the moon but then not do it” isn’t a plot. So […]
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: it would appear, from the evidence, that there are two ways you can treat the Apollo moon missions in […]
It’s quite obvious that a lot of love went into making Apollo 18, so it’s a real shame that Apollo 18 is the result. That is to say: the movie is so utterly broken at a conceptual level that a truly good film was completely out of the question, and yet director Gonzalo López-Gallego flung […]
Robert Hamer’s contribution to the Carry On Campaign brought along with it something of a present: a plausible excuse to write about a movie that I will admit to enjoying far beyond any defensible reason. Of course, it’s actually a pretty fine piece of cinema, but my affection is mired rather more in space travel […]
I was not alive during the 1960s, but that decade has been so thoroughly strip-mined and repackaged that I sometimes wonder if I’ve missed out on anything. But then, I see something like In the Shadow of the Moon, and I am reminded: I missed that. You know, that whole “Space Age” thing. To be […]
