THE LIST IS AN ABSOLUTE GOOD

30 November, 1993, represents the dividing point in the career of director Steven Spielberg. Prior to this, he was primarily a director of ebullient, exhilarating popcorn movies; since then, he has primarily been a director of largely serious dramas, with even his genre films tending to be more about investigating society than providing easy thrills. The divide between these phases of his career is simply identified, for it was on 30 November that...

Read More

LITTLE BOYS LOST

These Birds Walk is a documentary about the life of poverty-ravaged boys in Karachi, Pakistan; and it is unmistakably made for a Western audience.This bothers me more than it has any reason to, for the film is absolutely not a sad-eyed ethnography or exotic exploration of culture - no Slumdog Millionaire or the like here. In fact, it's pretty transparently the case that directors Omar Mullick and Bassam Tariq actively intended for These Birds Walk...

Read More

REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - HIROSHIMONSTER

The whole movie is so completely nuts that trying to select a single element and declare "this is the most interesting part" is totally useless, but certainly one of the things that is particularly interesting about Frankenstein Conquers the World is the window it provides into how Japanese pop culture shifted in its relationship to the atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki over the course of a decade. Its release date was specifically tied to...

Read More

THE THANKSGIVING POST

Having a commemorative day always makes it feel a lot less gooey and sentimental to do this kind of thing, but it applies every single day of the year: I am truly thankful to have all of, my readers, without whom there'd be no point to my doing this charming nonsense that I do. And I like doing this nonsense. All this seems especially important to say at a time like this, when my IRL job has been handing my ass to me pretty much nonstop ever since halfway through the Film Festival back in October, and there have been times when keeping up with...

Read More

TIM AT TFE: FOR THE FIRST TIME IN FOREVER

Disney animation being something of a thing around here, I'm planning my customary book-length review of the newly released Frozen, almost certainly to go up on Monday. In the meantime, my short, initial thoughts are available right now at The Film Experien...

Read More

TRAVELS WITH MY DAD

Update: This review was based on what was in retrospect a screening plagued by a highly deficient projector resulting in unusually poor image quality. While I don't suspect that I'd ever come anywhere close to actually liking the movie, it's safe to say that my actual thoughts are more of a 6/10 than a 5/10, and this review should probably be disregarded.Among those who just don't like the work of director Alexander Payne - and given how much more...

Read More

GETTING THE GANG BACK TOGETHER

The Best Man Holiday - which possesses a truly awful title, I hope we can all agree; even a simple apostrophe-s after "Man" would have helped - is the weirdest sequel of the year, greeted with some awfully hostile "why on earth are you bothering?" criticisms. I wish more films would do exactly the same thing, because it's a terrific idea.Basically, it's pulling a page from the Before Sunset playbook: many years ago, we left these characters in a...

Read More

REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - THREE HEADS ARE BETTER THAN ONE

Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster represents the most profound shift in the fortunes of the Godzilla franchise throughout the first 20 years of its existence. On the most essential level, it's the point where outright science fiction entered the picture, and as a direct result, it's the point at which the series' evergreen screenwriter Sekizawa Shinichi finally perfected the unbelievably weird and warped storytelling style that he'd employ nonstop...

Read More

JUST WHEN I THOUGHT I WAS OUT, THEY PULL ME BACK IN

There's nothing, as I recall, specifically wrong about The Hunger Games, the massive smash hit that sent a brand-new franchise into the stratosphere early in 2012. There's also nothing specifically right about it - it's a perfectly satisfactory piece of consumer product with some smart casting choices and a humongously forgettable script. While its first sequel, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire is also, first and foremost, a piece of consumer product,...

Read More

PERSONAL CANON: SEA-CROSSED LOVERS

You know Tay Garnett? You probably haven't heard of Tay Garnett. The fact of the matter is, Tay Garnett really isn't a terribly important film director, though there are those among us who perk up at checking out what promises to be yet another '30s or '40s programmer, and unexpectedly find his name attached. I think that in order to be such a strange and rare creature as a Garnett fanboy, one must have come to two very particular films first in...

Read More

FAULK OFF

In the first place, there's absolutely no shame in failing to successfully adapt William Faulkner's 1930 novel As I Lay Dying into a cinematic form, as self-indulgent multi-hyphenate James Franco has so conspicuously failed to do. It is one of the most formally bookish books ever written, and while I think the word "unfilmable" really means that the person using that word is only admitting to their own lack of creativity and imagination, As I Lay...

Read More

MONSTROUS DISAPPOINTMENT

In the grand tradition of blog series throughout the internet, Review All Monsters! has hit itself a snag, Owing, undoubtedly, to Netflix's hellbent urge to stop having DVDs involved with its DVD-by-mail service, there apparently aren't enough discs of Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster to go 'round, so I find myself staring an unyielding "Long wait" in the face, as I have done for some days now. Meanwhile, my customary back-up plan of accidentally finding perfectly legal copies of rare or never-on-home-video movies underneath rocks in the magical...

Read More

MOVIES I MISSED IN 2013: ARBITRARY AND CAPRICIOUS

In the wake of tragic, violent crimes, there's a ubiquitous, easy, and simple response: shake your head, look downcast, and intone in a very mordant tones, "What sort of person would do a thing like that?"What's not ever supposed to happen, is somebody actually going out and answering that question, and that's the most outrageous, stunning, wonderful thing about music video director Alexandre Moors's feature debut, Blue Caprice. Here is a film that...

Read More

MOVIES I MISSED IN 2013: PERSECUTION SIMPLEX

Director Thomas Vinterberg's 1998 sophomore feature, The Celebration (or Festen; I'm never clear on which is the preferred U.S. title), is one of the agreed-upon masterpiece of 1990s cinema. That being said, I don't personally have much use for it at all, owing in part to it being the flagship of the Dogme 95 movement, for which I also don't have much use at all. So the awestruck praise that swirled around his latest, the apparent return-to-form...

Read More