Ordinarily, one does not use the phrases “pretty damn great” and “crushing disappointment” in close proximity in a film review – yet here comes True Grit, the fifteenth feature written and directed by everyone’s favorite Minnesotan brothers, Joel and Ethan Coen; their first honest-to-God Western in a career that has consisted of almost nothing but […]
Let Me In is the best English-language vampire movie in ages. Ages. That must not be denied (though with competition like Twilight, we must ask ourselves: is it that big of an achievement). If it suffers, it is only because of 2008’s Let the Right One In, the best vampire film, irrespective of language (it’s […]
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 […]
1973’s The Crazies isn’t exactly a “great” movie, expecially in comparison to director George A. Romero’s early and more famous story of rural Pennsylvanians trying to survive an onslaught of murderous subhumans (namely, Night of the Living Dead), but it is quite good. And most if its goodness comes from the tremendous specificity of its […]
Confession time: when I first came up with the idea for this whole big Michael Mann retrospective, there was one overriding motivation for it. See, I was super-excited for the impending Public Enemies, but I couldn’t really explain why. “You have no reason to be enthusiastic for a Mann film,” I told myself. “You liked […]
The tidal wave of ’70s and ’80s genre film remakes that started up in the early years of this decade has produced works of wildly varying quality, from indefensibly wretched (The Hitcher) to no better than absolutely necessary (The Hills Have Eyes) to unexpectedly good (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre). The only watermark yet to hit […]
The second of two reviews. The first can be found here. In 1988, Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski and his co-writer Krzysztof Piesiewicz released Dekalog, a ten-episode TV miniseries explicating each of the Ten Commandments, that is acclaimed from virtually every corner as one of the essential masterpieces of world cinema. In the same year, the […]
The first of two reviews. The second can be found here. In 1988, Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski and his co-writer Krzysztof Piesiewicz released Dekalog, a ten-episode TV miniseries explicating each of the Ten Commandments, that is acclaimed from virtually every corner as one of the essential masterpieces of world cinema. In the same year, the […]
The newest adaptation of Richard Matheson’s epoch-defining vampire novel I Am Legend has, perhaps surprisingly, quite a few things to recommend it, not least that it’s the first to actually take Matheson’s title. Which might give you at list a glimmer of hope that it would correspondingly be the first satisfying adaptation, which isn’t ultimately […]
Much earlier in the year, I lavished some very reserved praise on the already-forgotten Seraphim Falls for being, and I am here quoting myself and yes that is wankery, “nothing so much as a tour of the Western…a synthesis of all Westerns.” It would appear that 2007 is now the Year of Western Syntheses, for […]
In the 1950s, people were paranoid about the Commies, the bomb, their neighbors, whatever. In the 1970s, they were just paranoid. After Watergate essentially destroyed any chance that a whole generation of Americans would ever trust their government, the decade witnessed a cycle of movies whose entire theme consisted mostly of “they’re trying to get […]
