THE LIGHTS THAT STOP ME

There is much to be argued for simple things done well. I present for your approval Beyond the Lights, a backstage melodrama and love story that invents nothing, does not surprise, and is still one of the most rewarding films to come out (and then almost immediately vanish) in the waning months of 2014. Blame an tiny distributor without the means to push it hard, blame marketers who are skittish about pushing movies about non-white people for mass...

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 2003: In which sufficient willpower, marketing, and blind luck can sell anything, no matter how unfashionable

Pirate movies were dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.The pirate movie had died many times since its heyday, from the early-'20s through the mid-'50s. It had a very high-profile death in 1986, with Roman Polanski's long-gestating Pirates, an enormous flop; it had another in 1995, with Renny Harlin's tormented Cutthroat Island,...

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DISNEY SEQUELS I MISSED IN 2014: I TINK, THEREFORE I AM

The once-proud DisneyToon Studios, formerly a mighty machine ceaselessly cranking out sequel upon sequel to the films of the Walt Disney Feature Animation canon, has of late been reduced to listlessly cranking out Planes and Tinker Bell movies at a slow drip. And between these two points, we run almost the whole gamut of the company's output: Planes and Planes: Fire & Rescue have been middling-to-awful, where as the Tinker Bells, when they are...

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DEATH MARCH OF THE PENGUINS

I know you all can't wait to hear my thoughts on the week's new invisibly mediocre animated film & box office underperformer, but in order to know my thoughts on Penguins of Madagascar, you'll have to head over to The Film Experience. Or not. I mean, it's Penguins of Madagascar, it is not exactly the stuff of heady analysis and sparkling back-and-forth conversation. But that is, anyway, where my review can be fou...

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 2002: In which having too many resources can make interesting directors much less interesting

David Fincher has directed nine features as of 2014, and 2002's Panic Room is almost beyond question the least interesting one to talk about on its own merits (which isn't to say it's his worst: even that would make it more interesting). This is exactly why I picked it as his representative in this series: while Se7en is surely his most influential project, Fight Club the one with the most to chew on, and so on, Panic Room is the one that most emphatically...

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 2001: In which rank cynicism turns out to be the thing animation needed all along

As the Hollywood Century takes us into the 21st Century and thus near to the present day, I shall find myself increasingly hard-pressed to do much good situating the films I'm discussing in any kind of historical context: we're still in that historical context, for the most part, and it will take a few more years to authoritatively state what the cinema of the early to mid-2000s begot and transformed into. But in at least one regard, I can state...

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: LARS AND THE REAL GIRLS

And so, Nymphomaniac; or is it Nymph()maniac? There are more than just cosmetic reasons for the latter to count as the actual title, since the dividing line between nymph and maniac is even more important to the film's project than the fact that an open parenthesis followed directly by a close parenthesis looks in the vaguest possible way like a vagina. But Nymp()maniac is cumbersome to type out and a bit pretentious so I will, not without regret,...

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 2000: In which we consider the matter of movie stars in the modern era

There are two ways to primarily think about Erin Brockovich, I believe: one is that it is among the most conventional films in the career of director Steven Soderbergh, which isn't to say that it's really so conventional as all that, but coming sandwiched in his career smack-dab in between The Limey and Traffic, it feels distinctly low in its ambitions, if not its execution. The other way is that this is a Julia Roberts vehicle, and maybe even THE...

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: 35 SHOTS OF RUMSFELD

It's stretching a point to call The Unknown Known a "sequel" to The Fog of War, but they make for a hell of a double feature. At a sufficient remove, the films are all but identical: Errol Morris, one of the great pop-journalist documentarians of the modern world, interviews a controversial U.S. Secretary of Defense, allowing him to narrate the story of his life and career, and especially giving him room to explore the ramifications of the notorious...

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QUENCHING FIRE

If nothing else, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 demonstrates with bleak efficiency that the director can only do so much. Francis Lawrence, making his second Hunger Game, still has all the chops he demonstrated with 2013's THG: Catching Fire and back further still to the 2007 adaptation of I Am Legend, once again capturing with admirable rawness the desperation and raggedness of life after apocalypse. But consistency and strength of tone,...

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1999: In which very old stories are given a very contemporary coat of paint, to the benefit of all

How does one try to summarise 1999 with one review of one movie? It was arguably (by which I mean "almost certainly, but let's not be smug know-it-all dicks about it") the single most transformative year of American filmmaking after the collapse of the New Hollywood Cinema. A stunning number of major filmmakers made some of their most important films that year: Stanley Kubrick, Paul Thomas Anderson, Michael Mann, David Fincher leap to mind, while...

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