The pair of surreal children’s fantasies written by Charles “Lewis Carroll” Dodgson, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, have been adapted for cinema and television as often as any other work of English literature I can name outside of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Yet, despite a tradition of adaptation stretching back […]

The thing about Avatar is that it’s not really a movie. It is, of course, but applying normal movie rules to it seems terribly inappropriate: yeah, the characters are thin stereotypes and the dialogue is wooden when it isn’t worse, and the plot is every “soldier learns to respect and love the people he was […]

The biggest surprise by far to be found in Robert Zemeckis’s new adaptation of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is that it isn’t absolutely dreadful. Perfectly pointless, maybe, but not dreadful. At this point, there have been so many film adaptations of the 1843 novella that it’s nearly impossible to imagine what conceivable purpose another […]

The Final Destination films has always possessed a sort of crude purity. Even more than in most body count movies, where narrative is usually more of a pretext than an actual legitimate element, this series is unusually eager to admit that it’s about one thing and one thing only: absurdly contrived and colorfully violent death […]

The wave has broken and rolled back, finally: Up is the first film by Pixar studios in three years that does not fundamentally redefine what animated cinema is capable of achieving in the hands of modern filmmaking’s greatest collection of geniuses. It is merely an example of what modern filmmaking’s greatest collection of geniuses are […]

Oh, Henry Selick has absolutely pwn3d Jeffrey Katzenberg. Pwn3d the hell out of him. For what feels like about five years, Katzenberg has been promising everyone who would listen that the first quarter of 2009 was going to bear witness to THE 3-D movie, the one that would knock us all on our asses with […]

2009 is just barely a month old, but I’m already prepared to call it a better year for movies than 2008. After only 37 days, we’ve been gifted with the year’s first masterpiece; at the very least, it’s much superior to all five films currently jockeying for the 2008 Best Picture Oscar. The film is […]

I just don’t know about the 3-D remake of My Bloody Valentine. It is extremely trashy, and it knows it – which is good. It is one of the only slasher movies in well over a decade that isn’t mired in self-parody – which is also good. It is dedicated to the idea that over-the-top […]

So, the big techies in the film world would have it that the super-realistic “Real D” 3-D technology is a paradigmatic leap in the art of cinema like sound, color and widescreen were. Okay, let’s stick with that. If the coming of great 3-D is as big a deal as the coming of sound was, […]

OH MY GOD, THE FACES. Or, I think this is as good a time as any to ask a question that clearly hasn’t been asked recently: just because we have all of these wonderful toys in modern filmmaking, that doesn’t mean we have to use all of them. Take for instance motion capture CGI. Is […]

It seems likely that we are on the cusp of a new wave in three-dimensional cinema. The usual suspects (soulless technocrat George Lucas; the marketing genii at Disney; Zemeckis and Spielberg and their descendents) are convinced that this will give them new licence to create beautiful, immersive worlds, expand the limits of storytelling, and release […]