In the very first scene of Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, screenwriters J.K. Rowling and Steven Kloves make “Dumbledore is gay” canonical in the Harry Potter universe. At the far side of 142 impossibly unhurried minutes, this will turn out to have been the most consequential narrative development of the film. After three films, this prequel series that nobody really asked for and, it’s increasingly clear, nobody actually wanted […]
The Lost City is about as close to being a direct remake of the 1984 Robert Zemeckis film Romancing the Stone as I can imagine somebody trying to get away with, without acquiring the rights to that film. I lead with this not because I plan to spend the rest of this review using that as a stick with which to beat up on The Lost City, but specifically because […]
We’ve had two massive box hits in the last four months, but more importantly, we’re starting to get modest successes again (I am here thinking mostly of Dog and The Lost City, the latter of which I hope to finally get to very soon) and that, I think, is the best sign we’ve had in two years and one month that theatrical movies are back, mostly. Not in huge numbers […]
Birthdays have a way of focusing one’s attention on where he has been and how he got here. Birthdays that end in 0 do this even more so. Today is my birthday, and it’s one of the ones ending in 0. I have built the four decades of my life around movies. Watching them, writing about them, teaching other people how to watch and write about them. For a very, […]
We’ve got to start somewhere, so why not with the question that I’ve been kicking around in my head since I finished Space Jam: A New Legacy: how can anyone worship a God vindictive and hateful enough to allow this movie to exist? No wait, that’s the other question I’ve been kicking around. The one I wanted to open with is, why is this movie so insufferably bad as a […]
I have certainly not seen every single movie released in 2020, but I have an extremely hard time imagining any of them beginning with a more profoundly horrible bit of screenwriting than Godmothered, a Disney thing that clearly hoped to capture some of that old Enchanted magic, and had to settle for being shit out onto Disney+ right at the time of year when parents just need to put literally […]
To begin with the only issue of any real importance: in the Netflix original movie The Christmas Chronicles: Part Two, Kurt Russell isn’t nearly as much pure, weightless fun in the role of Santa Claus as he was in 2018’s The Christmas Chronicles. This is in part, of course, because The Christmas Chronicles: Part Two can’t possibly hope to have the same spark of newness; we already know what Russell […]
That the new film adaptation of Roald Dahl’s 1983 book The Witches would be worse than its source, and worse as well than the 1990 version of the story directed by Nicolas Roeg, is hardly any surprise at all, and really not even worth commenting on. What shocked me is just how bad it is, entirely on its own terms. Especially since those terms include being a collaboration between Robert […]
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 […]
There is, to my knowledge, no evidence that the Walt Disney Company was so mortified at the thought of releasing Artemis Fowl to theaters that it engineered SARS-CoV-2 and triggered a global pandemic solely to have a reasonable excuse to dump the film to the Disney+ streaming service. But one cannot help but wonder. The film is an adaption of the first book in a series of YA fantasy novels […]
2018 was my favorite year of cinema in the 21st Century. Best to get that kind of thing right out in the open, yes? I’d love to tease out a through-line that connects everything, but I don’t know that it’s worth it: it was the best year because it had a tremendously lopsided number of the best movies. Some pressed the boundaries of the medium; some simply did the same […]
As the daughter of a British mother, costume dramas were always a thing in my movie watching repertoire and I’m more lenient on them than I should be (unlike resident critic Tim). But as the daughter of an American dad and living in America, the concept of a monarchy lived mostly in the idea of celebrities as royalty more than actual ruling monarchs. Nevertheless, I still indulge in whatever historical […]
