From Up on Poppy Hill, the latest animated transmission from the out-world known as Studio Ghibli, shows Goro Miyazaki working in the same medium but in a wholly different timbre than his promising debut, Tales from Earthsea. Here, he has switched from imaginative myth-maker to chronicler of memory and nostalgia extremist, as his latest relays […]
Room 237
Who knew? When Stanley Kubrick was standing on the set of his heralded horror “classic” The Shining, he had a lot more on his mind than creating a faithful adaptation of the beloved Stephen King novel. Indeed, in the opinion of a few obsessive cinephiles (who become the subject of this provocative documentary), he was […]
Pain & Gain (Trailer)
Warm Bodies
At this point in the zombie mythology, there’s not much more a filmmaker can do. We’ve had the old fashioned voodoo version that made the horror films of the ’30s and ’40s quite laughable. Then there was the slow walking menace of the whole Night/Dawn/Day of the Dead ideal. Amped up when the Romero remake […]
The Host (Trailer)
Upstream Color (Trailer)
10 Directors Who Need to Make a New Movie ASAP
Sure, true art requires inspiration. Just look at the mediocrity coming out of the Hollywood hack machine every single week. When a filmmaker is truly taken with something, unable to live or breathe without bringing it to the big screen, we all benefit from their muse. But there are at least ten directors who have […]
The Place Beyond the Pines (Trailer)
Scary Movie 5 (Trailer)
World War Z (Trailer)
The Contrarian: I Want the Kathryn Bigelow Who Made Point Break Back
There’s a scene in Point Break in which the Ex-Presidents reveal to Johnny Utah (remember how there’s a character in this named Johnny Utah?) that they’re not robbing banks for the money. No, no, no my friend. Only Republicans rob banks for money. We rob banks to put our finger in the eye of The […]
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Room 237 (Trailer)
The Evil Dead (2013) (Trailer)
G.I. Joe: Retaliation (Trailer)
Admission (Trailer)
The Croods
Don’t let the accompanying credits fool you. Monty Python alum John Cleese may be listed as a co-writer for this prehistoric coming-of-age kiddie cartoon, but any Fawlty Towers-level of wit or humor has long since been sieved out by Dreamworks and its desire to create another cash cow animated franchise. As a result, The Croods […]
Olympus Has Fallen
Steeped in the kind of flag-waving jingoism we expect from someone like Peter Berg and destined to be a hit despite its gaping plot holes, Olympus Has Fallen proves that there is nothing more potent in the action film genre than a clever, workaday hero taking on a villain with more than mere evil on […]
The Sapphires
War-torn Vietnam, circa 1968, sounds like an offbeat location for a sassy, uplifting musical comedy. But then again, almost everything about Wayne Blair’s The Sapphires would qualify as “offbeat,” which is part of the crowd-pleaser’s numerous charms. Based on true events (which also inspired a stage production back in 2004), The Sapphires starts in rural […]
Reality (2013)
The Italy of Matteo Garrone’s Reality signifies the moral bankruptcy and delirium of Silvio Berlusconi’s government-as-game-show regime in a way that is both bitterly comical and frustrating in its shortsightedness. Seen through the eyes of fish-market owner and low-tier swindler Luciano (Aniello Arena), Naples, once the classical setting of such tremendous works as Vittorio De […]
Love and Honor
Graciously gathering the last three or four decades of the most impersonal and forgettable Vietnam films into one wet beer-belch of counter-culture signifiers and don’t-tread-on-me rhetoric, Danny Mooney’s Love and Honor is clearly the product of a group of filmmakers who are utterly disinterested with war. Tomcat Pvt. Mickey Wright (Liam Hemsworth) and his high-strung […]