There is a stat that I find somehow totally unexpected, even though I’d have guessed it right if you asked me beforehand: the highest-grossing baseball movie in history is A League of Their Own, the story of the first season of the short-lived All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, founded during World War II as a […]
The Tom Cruise intro I have spent a larger portion of my life thinking of Tom Cruise as a bobble-headed pretty boy than otherwise, but like all false beliefs, once you realise it’s not true, it’s hard to remember why you ever thought that way in the first place. I mean, yes, Top Gun, and […]
Director, producer, writer, micro-manager of cinematographers and editors – Stanley Kubrick was one of the most auteur theory friendly of all auteurs, for more than virtually any other filmmaker in history, he was fully and emphatically in control of every visual and sonic element in nearly all of his mature film work. I highly doubt […]
The best part first: Rush is Ron Howard’s best film since Apollo 13. Or at least his most entertaining, and for that director, there’s not a huge gap between those two positions. Of course, given the films he’s made in that 18-year gap, it’s no special achievement, but it is anyways exciting to see a […]
They say that good things come to those who wait, and I am happy to report that after months of patient waiting, 2013 has finally produced a movie that’s so bad it’s good, in the form of 3-D sports/dance hybrid Battle of the Year, something of a b-boying themed remake of the 1989 taekwondo tournament […]
That there are two animated films in the summer of 2013 which both feature a creature that just wants to race, doggone it, no matter what institutional bias he faces from the powers-that-be because he belongs to the wrong species, and when he eventually manages to make it into the big show, he ends up […]
With The Fan, we arrive at a very curious question that isn’t really as interesting as I probably think it is: can a performance be too good for a movie? The reason I ask this is because The Fan pairs the slick manipulations of a Tony Scott-directed thriller with the Method acting of Robert De […]
2013 has been a remarkably mediocre year for American animated features, but even in the company of Monsters University and Despicable Me 2, there’s something special about Turbo, the second and final DreamWorks Animation project of the year (following The Croods, which is starting to look like an elder statesman). It is mediocre; unabashedly so. […]
Inasmuch as it’s possible to feel sorry for a movie, I do feel sorry for Pixie Hollow Games. Originally pitched to be the fifth and last of the Disney Fairies features, with a release in 2012, it ended up being swapped with what was then being called Tinker Bell and the Mysterious Winter Woods, sliced […]
Days of Thunder shouldn’t be as good as it is, I want to say; but that would imply that it is good, and I’m not entirely sure if that’s the case. It oughtn’t be good, at least. Not with that script. And yet it’s so much better than the combined quality of its elements that […]
All things being equal, 42 should not be even as good as it is, with the caveat that as good as it is still has some definite problems. But it’s an inspirational biopic, and with the monstrously unprepossessing track record that those have, “good with some problems” is like, just one or two steps down […]
Director Steve James has earned himself a reputation for making extrarodinarily wonderful documentaries, beginning with the legendary 1994 sports doc Hoop Dreams, followed by 2002’s Stevie and 2011’s The Interrupters, three movies that are customarily held by fans of the form to be among the greatest non-fiction films made in the modern era. And this […]
