HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1951: In which the most important thing, onscreen and off, is lavish spectale and glitzy, high-class entertainment

There is no spectacle quite like the spectacle of the musicals made by MGM's A-list production unit under producer Arthur Freed. Glowing Technicolor, some of the most talented song-and-dance experts ever put on screen, enormous budgets spent on enormous sets: these are the ingredients to make a lifelong fan of the musical genre. Curiously, the Freed Unit musical is an almost entirely post-war phenomenon, despite the apparent reality that Hollywood...

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JULY 2014 MOVIE PREVIEW

By the end of the first weekend in June, it felt like we'd stumbled, quite by accident, onto one of the strongest summer movie seasons in years. Everyone's report card will be different, of course, but from where I'm standing, Edge of Tomorrow, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Maleficent, and Neighbors were all considerably better than I'd expected them to be going in (though they are not, of course, all equally good), and if we scan back a little bit, Captain America: The Winter Soldier joins them in that company. Godzilla was a terrific opening and...

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: FUCKIN' WHATEVER, ROBOTS

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: now we have Transformers: Age of Extinction out in the world, and I don't even know what to do with that fact. There are only so many things you can do with movies about robots from space, even when some of the space robots are dinosaurs. I just...

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: PSYCHO KNOCK-OFFS

There's little doubt that the heyday of Hammer Film Productions in the 1960s is now best-known for the studio's Gothic horror, films with Christopher Lee as Dracula and Peter Cushing as Dr. Frankenstein, and such. But while those films were being produced, Hammer was also busily cranking out a far less visible, though still awfully prolific, run of movies that were referred to, with admirable honesty of purpose, as their "mini-Hitchcocks": cheap...

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TIM AT TFE: YOU GOT THE TOUCH! YOU GOT THE POW-AH!

My weekly column at the Film Experience continues as ever, but I bring it up this time around since I know that at least some of you were hoping that I'd use the release of Michael Bay's Dinobot Thing to review Transformers: The Movie, the animated semi-classic from 1986. Well, you will be pleased to know, I have. Go, enjoy, discu...

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CHASING CARS

There's something especially annoying about a movie that veers between mostly good and very good for its entire running time, only to complete puke itself apart in the last few minutes. I present to you The Rover, writer-director David Michôd's sophomore feature after his impressive but in many ways frustratingly commonplace crime thriller Animal Kingdom. Two times isn't enough to make a tradition, but that's twice now that Michôd has almost succeeded...

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SUMMER OF BLOOD, WEEK 6 POLL: PSYCHO KNOCK-OFFS

VOTING CLOSED - WINNER: FANATICThanks to everyone who voted!Not many films in cinema history, irrespective of genre, had as significant or immediate an impact as Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 horror thriller Psycho. We shall not, at this moment, rehearse all the many things that changed in the wake of Psycho, limiting ourselves to one of the most visible and overt immediate responses: the B-movie producers of the world immediately understood that a new market for movies about crazy killers had just announced itself (it proved to be an especially popular...

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VEGAS IS FOR LOVERS

2012's Think Like a Man is, by and large, not a very good movie. But it does an absolutely fantastic impression of one, thanks to a game cast of very talented comic actors who don't get very much work in major movies owing to their unbankable skin color, all of them working double-time to flesh out the basic notion of their various characters with depth and personality, giving the film a genuinely appealing "let's hang out" vibe that mostly compensates...

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1950: In which thar be pirates, matey

In the annals of films with an influence completely disproportionate to their quality or latter-day popularity, the 1950 adaptation Treasure Island stands out as a genuinely iconic work of pop art. I can think of no film that has influenced so many people who have never seen it in such a narrow way: it is nothing less than the movie that nailed down the pirate accent as we know and love it today. In playing Long John Silver, the most famous buccaneer...

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: CLINT SINGS!

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: there are not many living filmmakers whose style and interests would seem to make them a worse fit for making a musical than Clint Eastwood, and yet here he is, counter-intuitively making Jersey Boys. Of course, this is not, notoriously, Eastwood's...

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1949: In which a cold war replaces the hot one, in guiding how society thinks about itself

The Woman on Pier 13 had previews under the title I Married a Communist, and only came into its far less show-offy title when the test audiences rejected it for reasons that probably make perfect sense in the cultural context of 1949, but all it really says to me is that people used to have way less awesome tastes. Because The Woman on Pier 13 is like a pair of fresh-washed jeans, crisp and sturdy and really quite impossibly unexceptional, but I...

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MY EYES ABHORRED YOU

Well, we finally got there: a Clint Eastwood movie that even I, ever the enthusiastic Clint Eastwood apologist, can't pretend is worth a damn. We have in front of us Jersey Boys, a sepulchral adaptation of the 2005 jukebox musical based on the songs of the Four Seasons that has been stripped bare of any life or energy, and it's easily the worst thing the director has signed off on since Blood Work over a decade ago. It's not just because it fails...

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