There is a cave system in the south of France, named Chauvet after one of the three people who discovered in 1994. The Chauvet cave contains a wealth of paintings created by Stone Age artists; there are the usual dating controversies that crop up whenever people want to find exact dates for things that happened […]
Drive Angry is above all else a shockingly fetishistic motion picture. It fetishises acts of brutal violence; it fetishises gorgeously preserved early-70s muscle cars; in an extremely distant third place, it manages, just barely, to fetishise naked women. But mostly violence and cars: the former presented by director Patrick Lussier with lingering, worshipful slow-motion, the […]
I’m not certain how ashamed I’m meant to be that I didn’t find Sanctum to be at all bad. Mind you, I didn’t find it particularly good, but it feels like the sort of movie one should hate with a full-throated hate. Thing is, the film only really sets out to do one thing, and […]
Pixar Animation Studios’ Day & Night played in theaters in front of the beloved Toy Story 3, the highest-grossing feature of 2010. I don’t think I’m being perverse if I say that I distinctly preferred the short, at that; my bona-fides as a Pixar fanatic and a Toy Story 3 partisan are not, or should […]
There’s really no way around it: TRON: Legacy is almost certainly the shallowest film of 2010. It is huge and shiny; it sounds like God himself was tinkering in the editing booth; the female lead is about as hot as it gets, and she spends every minute in a form-fitting costume with brightly colored lines […]
An earlier review of this film can be found here. By the end of 2005, Walt Disney Feature Animation was undeniably playing the obnoxious kid brother to Pixar Animation Studios, the company whose films had out-grossed WDFA every single year that they both released a film. Notwithstanding the reasonable success of Chicken Little, which grossed […]
The Saw films and I are not buddies, to put it mildly. Though there is hiding within the first one a very good psychological “chamber horror” film, it is not itself a very good film, and the sequels have all in their way proven to be one diminishing return after another. And morally vicious! I […]
Though the last few years have seen a gradual return to harder and more violent horror movies after about a decade of feeble, teen-friendly thrillers, it’s still hard to be prepared for Piranha 3D, directed by French gorehound Alexandre Aja, from a screenplay by Pete Goldfinger & Josh Stolberg. This is not a film that […]
By every functional yardstick, Step Up 3D is a stupid movie. This is such an undeniable fact that the only debate worth having is on the precise modality of its stupidity: is it willfully stupid? criminally stupid? delightfully stupid? extravagantly stupid? Yes, yes, DEFINITELY YES, yes. Part of me – nor a small part – […]
“These are the days of miracle and wonder” sang Paul Simon on the opening track of his 1986 album Graceland, and though he was talking about heart transplants and guerrilla warfare in Africa, his sentiment is truer today than ever before: we truly do live in an age of wonders. For who among us had […]
With memories of How to Train Your Dragon and Toy Story 3 still lingering heavily in the air – to say nothing of the aftertaste of the feature animation annus mirabilis that was 2009 – it’s not hard to want Despicable Me to be better than it is. Yet at the same time, with things […]
A series of rattletrap Disney parodies put out by DreamWorks Animation whenever they need quick access an amount of ready cash greater than the gross domestic product of any given African nation, the Shrek films have never exactly been my cup of tea: they’re snitty rather than clever, they shoulder most of the responsibility for […]
