Over the last decade and change, movie goers have been overwhelmed by a deluge of superhero movies. Most of them have been good to great, while others are best forgotten altogether. At any rate, it’s a good time to be a comic book fan who also happens to love movies. While Bryan Singer’s seminal X-Men flick is usually considered to […]
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It is a common practice for filmmakers to pay homage to the films and filmmakers that inspired them. From Star Wars to Boogie Nights, from Dressed to Kill to Sukiyaki Western Django, and from Night of the Living Dead to Pulp Fiction, cinema history can be read as a long list of directors who are showing respect to those who […]
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I want to set the record straight right off the bat: despite this film’s inclusion in this column, The Five Year Engagement isn’t “broken” in any significant way. It’s a very warm, sweet, and funny movie, full of good performances and with a lively, clever script. It didn’t light a fire under me like other Apatow productions, but it’s still […]
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These days, it seems like you can’t spit without hitting a found-footage horror film. The odds of hitting a good one (or even a truly great one) are much, MUCH slimmer, but because they are cheap to make and they usually rake in the dough, Hollywood (not to mention all those young up and coming horror directors out there who […]
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Joseph Hall once wrote “Death borders upon our birth, and our cradle stands in the grave.” In other words, like it or not, death is an inevitability for all of us. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that death features prominently in popular culture. Countless films, books, poems, and songs feature death as a prominent theme, often in an […]
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Hoo, boy. I know I’m inviting a whole storm of anger by suggesting that The Hunger Games is a movie that needs fixing. This is a series with a passionate and vocal legion of fans, and which has reached a cultural saturation unseen since the Twlight novels. It’s made a pretty penny at the box office, to say the least, and has […]
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We all have gaps in our cinematic knowledge, films which, if we confess our ignorance of, someone, somewhere will say, “How have you not seen that?!” Catching Up is about these films, and viewing them so long after seemingly everyone else has. Some of these entries may be shocking, some are embarrassing, but all of them are classics. The Film: […]
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Cinema is an interesting art form, in that it is made up of a number of other art forms, including theater, painting, music, and writing (among others). Not all films can be considered art, nor should they all strive to be, but when they do rise to that level, they become something that can help us better understand ourselves, and […]
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I’m much like my grandmother in the way that my ears get nervous just like hers do. Whenever “CSI: Miami” is turned up too loud on her television she gets incredibly irritable and uncomfortable and complains that her ears are nervous. What the hell is my point? My point is that SILENT HOUSE made my ears nervous. The house is […]
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John Carter has received a mostly negative reaction, both from critics and movie fans. General audiences appear to have shunned the film as well, in America at least, although you can blame that on a botched marketing campaign more than the film itself. But I liked the movie. Quite a bit, in fact. It’s infused with a rousing sense of […]
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