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: after this many entries in their surprisingly durable franchise, the zoo animals of Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted are […]
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: there are many ways that musty old folklore can be dusted off and freshened up for a modern audience, […]
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 took 10 long years of nobody anywhere giving much of a shit one way or the other, but […]
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: of all the things you can turn into movies, board games are one of the weirdest, and an ice-cold […]
Every Sunday this summer – and between the Year of Blood and a nightmarish stretch of shaky internet, I wasn’t able to get this in on Sunday, but let’s make believe – we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor […]
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 is held that The Avengers represents some kind of unprecedented achievement, which is entirely true, from a branding […]
Since Ordet is all about the Big Questions, I don’t see any reason not to lead off my review of it with Grand Statements all my own – though since the movie is anything but hyberbolic, I do so with a fair and appropriate degree of shame. First, it is the greatest movie about religion, […]
The title of a work of art can be a lot of things: metaphorical, suggestive, cryptic, punning, stentorian. Or, it can be merely descriptive. But even as a merely descriptive title, 1964’s Robinson Crusoe on Mars deserves some kind of prize. Films with titles that feel more like a pitch meeting than a legitimate name […]
Winning Oscars can do terrible things to a film: on the one hand, it’s probably the safest guarantee that a movie from the ’30s or ’40s will continue to get modern eyeballs on it, but it also invariably raises expectations that, the Oscars being the Oscars, don’t tend to be sufficiently paid off. And so […]
If I say “Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island“, and you are anybody but a Jules Verne scholar (to judge from my Site Meter stats, there is a good possibility that this is the case), I bet that the first thing that pops into your head is “giant bees”, and if it’s not that, it’s “giant chicken-beast”, […]
There’s been a lot of chatter lately, among a certain kind of cinephile – my kind, I will admit up front, though I don’t really talk about it here – about the impending death of celluloid film as a production, distribution, and archival medium in the United States. Naturally inclining to pessimism, I suspect that […]
In addition to their classier, better-known status as the most mature decade in the history of mainstream American cinema, the 1970s could also be rightfully called the Decade of the Rip-Off; not since the onset of World War II taught the world a healthy sense of shame had such a robust culture of knock-offs and […]
