There is nothing small about Christopher Nolan’s newest, longest film, the epic space drama Interstellar. Its strengths are as gargantuan and overpowering as its mighty flaws, and just as impossible to miss. I have absolutely no idea whether I liked it as a work of cinema, but I know this much for a dead certainty: […]
To get the grubby part out of the way first: Life Itself is a somewhat banal piece of documentary craftsmanship. A lot of talking heads, e-mails represented by onscreen text, old clips. It’s something we’ve all see a billion times, and it is frankly disappointing that Steve James, the man who made the expansive epic […]
Don’t miss the first part of this two-part review! It says everything that the titular character character from the 1997 Jack Frost is the soul of a serial killer, who turned his victims into meat pies, inhabiting a snowman who murders people, including one whose face he bites off with his icicle teeth, and he […]
The caveat first: throughout this Hollywood Century project, I’ve been using a definition of “Hollywood’ that limits us to films produced solely on money contributed by Los Angeles-based movie sturdios, or by independents working in the shadow of Hollywood. I’m now making a big exception for the first time, to accommodate 1948’s The Search, a […]
It is not possible to talk about the Hollywood star system or film culture or really mass media in general as those things existed in the 1930s without talking about Shirley Temple. She defines her era in a way that very few movie performers have: she was the most popular movie star in the world […]
There’s a very real danger of applying a most peculiar kind of grading curve to Saving Mr. Banks. It’s a movie produced by Walt Disney Pictures, with Walt Disney as an actual character, and it presents him as more of a human being with good and bad characteristics than a plaster saint? He’s seen stubbing […]
These Birds Walk is a documentary about the life of poverty-ravaged boys in Karachi, Pakistan; and it is unmistakably made for a Western audience.This bothers me more than it has any reason to, for the film is absolutely not a sad-eyed ethnography or exotic exploration of culture – no Slumdog Millionaire or the like here. […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/16 & 10/18 & 10/19World premiere: 16 August, 2013, Gramado Film Festival There are critics whose first word on Chasing Fireflies would be about its tender but not sentimental depiction of a reunion between father and daughter; there are critics whose first word on Chasing Fireflies would be to consider the film’s […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/13 & 10/15World premiere: 26 April, 2013, HotDocs Canadian International Documentary Festival Winner of the Gold Hugo for Best Documentary There is an Iranian man, Mahmood Kiyani Falavarjani, whose life in even the most succinct terms is so unbelievably interesting that a whole series of feature length documentaries might just about be […]
American independent filmmaking is as capable of producing uninspired, derivative hackwork as any other production model, and frequently has in the past few years. But sometimes, things just click, and we’re lucky enough to get one of those truly interesting and meaningful stories about normal human lives in all their intoxicating smallness that make people […]
The shockingly – one might fairly say unprecedentedly – successful Mexican import Instructions Not Included possesses a title and the skeleton of a plot (womanizer has an illegitimate child dropped on his doorstep, must take care of her) that makes it absolutely obvious what kind of film it is: a warm and cuddly two hours […]
I had been warned in advance by many, including regular commenter and generally savvy student of animation Trish, that the third movie of the Disney Fairies line, Tinker Bell and the Great Fairy Rescue, was thematically problematic. So I was prepared, and ended up finding the movie not as massively irritating as I think I […]
