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Franchises & Series · SF & Fantasy
We could call Episode I the first of the modern “digital epics.” It is perhaps the single most influential film on today’s Hollywood, the film that introduced the concept of[…]
Filmmakers like Argento have no interest in sex per se. Suffering seems inessential, but terror and death are key, photographed with the same clinical absorption and aesthetic gloss as giallo-maestros[…]
Franchises & Series · Thrillers & Action
Fallout is basically about Ethan holding on, not just to elevators, helicopters, or sliding rocks, but to immortality and the ridiculous notion of the perfect man. He is fast, strong,[…]
Movie Vacations · Music & Musicals
An Altman theme park does, in fact, exist. Sweethaven, the set of Altman’s 1980 musical Popeye, lives on in Mellieħa, a village on the island of Malta, where Harry Nilsson’s[…]
Andrew Stone and his fantastically helpful wife-editor have evolved an entirely different ethos of film-making.… If they want to blow up a train, they blow up a real train. If[…]
The middle-aged theater owner who preferred a discreet lifestyle suddenly found himself in the media spotlight only ten days after the Black Dahlia’s murder. Someone had gathered Elizabeth Short’s personal[…]
Franchises & Series · Thrillers & Action
As the years have gone by, the heroes have become less McClane-like and become, again, Ramboesque demigods. This goes for McClane, too. In the first Die Hard film, he looks[…]
Activist & Political · Documentaries · Medical
We’re reposting this review of The Bleeding Edge today, July 27, as it debuts on Netflix. See this important documentary. * * * This is the kind of cogent, well-researched exposé[…]
Franchises & Series · SF & Fantasy · Superheroes
So how does Disney repeatedly peddle the same action film while also making this story acceptable to the media as a progressive identity narrative for the little guy? How does[…]
Reed manages to reduce a sprawling, complex story into an engaging, if tentacled, 98-minute political thriller, focusing on Montana’s fight against dark money at the US Supreme Court, in the[…]
Film Technology & History · Historical & Epic
Through its complex use of multiple depth planes, deep-focus compositions, close proximity with on-screen texture, Pompeii crafts a vision of an ancient culture that can be described as hyper-haptic; in[…]
Comedy · Directors · Women in Film
American Audiences watched Irma la Douce without discomfort, perhaps because French prostitutes and pimps were performing immoral acts and misdeeds. The same subversion of middle-class values that would later inform[…]
Franchises & Series · SF & Fantasy
Jurassic Park, in all its dark consumeristic negatives and heartless colonial instincts, exists in the real world as a film in the same way that the park exists in the[…]
Documentaries · Philosophy · TV & Streaming
The film’s childhood-centric poignancy is underscored by the depravity of today’s kindergarteners having to be concerned more with the logistics of hardened desks or evacuation drills thanks in part to[…]
Nearly fifty years after its release, it’s clear Midnight Cowboy pulled off a neat trick. Its story of a naïve “Texas longhorn bull” hustler and a low-rent con man is[…]
Essays · French Cinema · Romance
What will become of Camilla? A character who is unsupported by theatrical context must cease to exist; when the curtain falls, the characters are unleashed from aesthetic dimensions. Renoir makes[…]
Essays · Historical & Epic · War
. . . or how the first surf films helped American men get over the war and change their act * * * In the 1950s and early ’60s, a[…]
Michael Clayton is a character who gets a wake-up call. It’s not an “oh, wow, they killed off that character” moment, it’s not a clever reveal, it’s not an “instant[…]
