If nothing else, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 demonstrates with bleak efficiency that the director can only do so much. Francis Lawrence, making his second Hunger Game, still has all the chops he demonstrated with 2013’s The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and back further still to the 2007 adaptation of I Am Legend, once again capturing with admirable rawness the desperation and raggedness of life after apocalypse. But […]
The 6th Antagonists, that is, but only the fifth by that name. At some point, I shall have to at least come up with a crappy MS Paint graphic of what an Antagonist actually looks like. Apologies for the lateness of this post this year! Sometimes life is not very busy, and sometimes it is, and I’ve been in the latter of those two states for all of the young […]
To begin with, let us first point out that One Million Years B.C., Hammer’s 1966 contribution to the caveman genre, rests its success on two qualities that are impossible for a 12-year-old boy to resist: some of the very best dinosaurs found anywhere in cinema before Jurassic Park came along with its CGI creations, and Raquel Welch at her absolute peak of physical attractiveness, wearing a pretty insubstantial animal hide […]
My primary objection to the massively successful, award-winning, generation defining The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, 2003’s conclusion to the film trilogy directed by Peter Jackson, adapted from J.R.R. Tolkien’s multi-volume fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings, is not an original one, nor a clever and insightful one, nor a bold one. My primary objection is that it’s too motherfucking long, and in particular that […]
Did I not say just recently of the Rankin/Bass animated TV special The Hobbit, that it is “the most emotionally and tonally accurate adaptation of [J.R.R. Tolkien’s] work that has yet been released”? Well then, it is with no small amount of amused irony that I take us to the same studio’s 1980 television adaptation of The Return of the King, which I’m just as confident in declaring the worst […]
Marilyn Monroe, the most iconic sex goddess in the history of cinema, passed away fifty years ago this week, leaving behind one of the most genuinely mythic careers in all of movie stardom. Naturally enough, this has caused a great many people to devote some energy to eulogising and celebrating the actress, including Nathaniel R of The Film Experience, who has very reasonably selected a Monroe vehicle for this week’s […]
Author’s note: when I first wrote this review, the film seemed so agreeably slight that it struck me as quite deranged that anybody had ever thought it could possibly win an Oscar for anything other than Colin Firth. Oops. Will revisit it one of these days, but for now, let’s enjoy the spectacle of a blogger trying way too hard to be clever and failing spectacularly. It’s a damned shame […]
Around these parts, the history of the Disney Animation Renaissance – the studio’s slide into irrelevance following its founder’s death in 1966, bottoming out in the tremendous box office implosion of The Black Cauldron in 1985, rebounding after the critical and commercial success of The Little Mermaid in 1989, and culminating in the immense popularity of The Lion King in 1994 – is something we already know a thing or […]
UPDATED, NOVEMBER 2021: The release of Disney’s 60th animated feature, Encanto, gave me the nudge I needed to go through this list and revise and update my rankings. The listmaker in me couldn’t help it: I’ve ranked the animated Disney features from best to worst, including a score out of ten. This list is subject to change without notice. Masterpieces (10/10) 1. Pinocchio (1940) 2. Bambi (1942) 3. Fantasia (1940) […]
It would be quite inaccurate to say that I loved the new Taking of Pelham 1 2 3; it’s a bit of a stretch to even say that I liked it. But I did find it to be frequently entertaining and enjoyable in the way that sound and fury can be entertaining of a summer’s afternoon, and this fact makes me very angry. For I have absolutely no use at […]
Author’s note: I have strong suspicions that I no longer agree with much of any of this review, but I haven’t seen the film since it was new in theaters – one of these days I really must revisit it and find out. The career of Danny Boyle has gone more places than just about any other modern filmmaker I can think of: from the drug caper Trainspotting to the […]
Robert Redford’s first overtly political film as a director, Lions for Lambs was made with what I am certain were the very best of intentions. We all know what road you can make out of good intentions. It’s a great muddle from the word go: the script, by Matthew Michael Carnahan (who debuted earlier this year with The Kingdom) is an exceptionally crude example of hyperlink cinema, the narrative genre […]
