A MAN WITH A VERY GENERIC SET OF SKILLS

Ask me three months ago, and I'd have said it was no surprise at all that Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit would be the best action movie starring Kevin Costner to be released in the first quarter of 2014. Ask me right after I saw Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, and I'd have said it was a goddamn impossibility. But here we are, and 3 Days to Kill exists, and boy is it ever a piece of shit.As produced by Luc Besson's Parisian Thriller & Growling Papa Bear...

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PREDICTIONS FOR THE 86th ACADEMY AWARDS

Shall we do this thing? Let's do this thing. It's the thing that American cinephiles get to do instead of caring about sports statistics, and I've had several weak years of predictions in a row, so I'm starting to get hungry to redeem myself.Best Picture12 Years a SlaveAmerican HustleCaptain PhillipsDallas Buyers ClubGravityHerNebraskaPhilomenaThe Wolf of Wall StreetWON: 12 YEARS A SLAVEWill Win: 12 Years a SlaveSpoiler: GravityMy Pick: GravityCutting to the chase: for anything but 12 Years a Slave, Gravity, or American Hustle to win would require...

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MOTIFS IN CINEMA: APPRECIATION OF LIFE

Motifs in Cinema is a discourse across film blogs, assessing the way in which various thematic elements have been used in the 2013 cinematic landscape. How does a common theme vary in use from a comedy to a drama? Are filmmakers working from a similar canvas when they assess the issue of death or the dynamics of revenge? Like most things, a film begins with an idea – Motifs in Cinema assesses how various themes emanating from a single idea change when utilised by varying artists.-Andrew K, Encore's World of Film & TVWhen I picked the theme...

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1915: In which we learn that the history of women in the director's chair is older and more robust than one might suppose

In her day, Lois Weber was regarded as one of the greatest, if not the greatest film director in America, but unlike contemporaries and near-contemporaries such as D.W. Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille, and Charles Chaplin, her name has not survived to any kind of broad recognition among general film buffs or even those with a particular fancy for silents. This has a great deal to do with availability, the bane of the early cinema enthusiast: out of the...

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ASH AND YOU SHALL RECEIVE

The opening image of Pompeii is an extreme close-up of a body covered in the ancient ash that exactly preserved its shape, against a black background, the sinewy camera movements letting us see every angle and the 3-D camera accentuating and exaggerating all the crags and shapes in glorious detail, using the best and brightest new technology to reach unprecedented new heights in the art of ogling dead bodies. Says it all, really.The other thing that...

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OSCAR-NOMINATED DOCUMENTARIES I MISSED IN 2013: LATE SPRING

There is much about The Square that is admirable, and I don't want to interrupt myself once I've gotten going on about it, so I want to get my single biggest negative comment out of the way first. This documentary is fantastic journalism, but pretty run-of-the-mill cinema. As so many are. There is a test I run on every single "issues" doc that I come across, which consists in its entirety of asking "Would I learn just as much in just as compelling...

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OSCAR-NOMINATED DOCUMENTARIES I MISSED IN 2013: PORTRAIT OF A MARRIAGE

Imagine, if you will, that one marriage you know that seems absolutely miserable and dysfunctional, the one that seems like it should have ended years ago, and nobody understands why it hasn't yet. And yet the participants are obviously committed to each with the ferocity of a rabid dog, making it clear by this point that if they haven't split up ten times over by now, they'll be together until the end of days. We all know that couple; and that couple...

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1914: In which the Hollywood feature film is born, alongside the career of a showman whose excessive style would later be regarded as an archetype of the form

There are old movies - really old movies, I mean, movies from the first 15 or 20 years of cinema, when the visual language and narrative structures were so different from any of the norms we've grown accustomed to in the intervening decades that it's virtually a different art form altogether - so self-assured and visionary and cunningly-mounted that the modern viewer has to make hardly any adjustments to fall into the rhythm of the thing and find...

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1914-2014: A HOLLYWOOD CENTURY

Go far enough back into movie history, and you can't trust dates; or much of anything else, for that matter. Still, the best I've been able to come up with is that 23 February, 1914, was the date that The Squaw Man opened. And traditionally - Lord knows if tradition has much of anything to do with reality - The Squaw Man was the first feature-length film shot in the suburban wilderness known as Hollywood, California, a neighborhood of the growing city of Los Angeles.Whether that's true or not, it makes for a convenient signpost. Let us call this...

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REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - THAT GHIDDY FEELING

Even by the standards of a movie franchise whose immediate prior entry featured an 80-meter dinosaur spitting beams of nuclear energy at a giant carnivorous rose that was cloned from the dinosaur's own DNA, the 1991 film Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah is really peculiar. Not, entirely, peculiar and bad. And I do not regard as a problem the single thing most often cited as a damned flaw in writer-director Ohmori Kazuki's script, that it doesn't get time...

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