I can barely process the words I’m about to type myself, but here goes nothing: imagine if – and it is a tough thing to imagine if you haven’t seen the evidence – imagine if there was a film about a 1970s British glam rock superstar so fucking bad that it made Bohemian Rhapsody look good. What you have perhaps just imagined is Stardust, a film about David Bowie’s 1971 […]

I have one thing about Disney’s new live-action Mulan that makes me extremely happy: it’s not a mindless shot-for-shot remake of the 1998 animated film, and in this respect is considerably less irksome than the 2017 Beauty and the Beast and the 2019 Aladdin and The Lion King, the other remakes of films from the studio’s 1990s renaissance. It’s not a top-to-bottom re-imagining of the material – after the first […]

Lady and the Tramp was the fifth, count ’em, fifth film released by the Walt Disney Company in 2019 that was more or less a redo of one of their classic animated features done up in some ungainly combination of live-action videography and CGI, following Dumbo, Aladdin, The Lion King, and Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, and it’s the one that was chosen to be part of the launch slate for […]

Certain beloved directors – Wes Anderson is an obvious example, but I’m sure we can all think of others – often get slagged for making the same movie over and over again. And while I’m sure we would in general prefer for directors to experiment and prod and try out new things, it’s worth pointing out that at least some of these filmmakers are making the same movie over and […]

A shorter version of this review was previously published at The Film Experience There are two different, and perhaps irreconcilable ways to watch Klaus. First, we could look at it as the directorial debut of Sergio Pablos, an animator who rose through Disney in the 1990s, ending up getting his first supervising animator credits on 1999’s Tarzan and 2002’s Treasure Planet, after which point it was bad business being a […]

Every week 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: Disney revives the evergreen “Arabian Nights adventure” genre with their new remake of Aladdin. The studio’s original 1992 version of that film was itself significantly influenced by a much older classic that was ALSO […]

Happy May Day everyone! It feels a bit presumptuous to start looking at a new month of releases when I still have to catch up from April – I hear that there’s been an Avengers picture that made a bit of money. And just as soon as I have any sort of chance to clear five consecutive hours out of my schedule to catch up with it, I’ll be happy […]

Mid-April is awfully early to be thinking about summer already, but Marvel and Disney have decided for the rest of us that the summer movie season begins this year on Friday, 26 April, with the release of Avengers: Endgame. To prepare, this episode will be all about the blockbuster movies to come: the superheroes, the living toys, the monsters who fit inside your pocket, the Hobbses and the Shaws. In […]

There’s a large section of Disney enthusiasts who, like me, cannot stand these live action remakes. For almost ten years now, the Walt Disney Company has spent a lot of time and money to produce big budget retellings of the most popular movies in their animated canon. Because we live in the age of nostalgia, these movies have proven to be huge commercial successes, and Disney has doubled down on […]

If you’ve seen Stranger Things or the recently released zeitgeist-embracing adventure The Kid Who Would Be King, you know there’s no shortage of nostalgia for the decades in which most of the folks reading this grew up. The 1980s and ’90s are en vogue and ready to transport you back to your Topanga poster-covered walls of your bedroom. Or whomever you were into at the time. Maybe it was just […]

Every week 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: in The Hitman’s Bodyguard, a hitman has a bodyguard. Do you perceive the knee-slapping humor of this incongruity? Because we tend to think of hitmen as being sufficiently capable to bodyguard THEMSELVES. Sadly, not […]

A review requested by Robert Hamer, with thanks for donating to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. It’s important to get it read into the record, right up front, that in a very real and very important sense, The Thief and the Cobbler doesn’t actually exist. Parts of it exist, and from these parts, we can generally extrapolate what the movie might have been like. This is indeed […]