Much of what I’ve seen in a theatre this year qualifies as genre movies. One day I’ll have to sit down and evaluate my viewing in some systematic way to figure out why I spend less and less time on serious drama as I get older (I have a friend who’s just the opposite; he […]
Fifty years ago today (the day after JFK was assassinated), as a nine-year-old boy living in a small village in southeast England, I sat down after what we then called “tea” (our evening meal) and started watching a TV show I knew nothing about. It had several characters in a blue police phone box who […]
For such a type to be successful means that its conventions have imposed themselves upon the general consciousness and become the accepted vehicles of a particular set of attitudes and a particular aesthetic effect. One goes to any individual example of the type with very definite expectations, and originality is to be welcomed only in […]
Although radio broadcasting arrived more than two decades after the birth of cinema – and movies were the dominant form of entertainment in North America for the first half of the century – radio was in some ways a far more important and influential medium. Looking back from the perspective of our wired (and wireless) […]
One of the best things about Glenn Erickson’s DVD Savant column over at DVD Talk is his habit of posting, along with his knowledgeable reviews, interesting and useful links. A little while back, he alerted his readers to the website of a museum in the Czech Republic devoted to the work of filmmaker and animator […]
Horror has been a staple of movie-making almost since the medium was invented – Georges Melies made Le Manoir du Diable in 1896 – and the genre has at times been suspended between art and exploitation, though perhaps more often slipping to the latter end of that spectrum. In the silent period, horror was dominated […]
The most recent movie I’ve seen in a theatre is Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim. I confess I didn’t have high hopes. I’ve always found his big budget mainstream productions far less satisfying than his more personal Spanish films, and the idea of giant robots versus giant monsters sounded like a live-action retread of too […]
While it’s quite common to like a movie despite its flaws, it’s also possible to appreciate a film in spite of its content. Griffith’s technical achievement can be admired even as we are appalled by the racist politics of Birth of a Nation; we can recognize the visual beauty of Riefenstahl’s use of camera and […]
Even after thirty years, George Miller’s Mad Max trilogy remains one of the most interesting and impressive series in popular cinema. A pity then that Warner Brothers didn’t take the opportunity of their recent Blu-ray box set to offer some kind of comprehensive retrospective account of the films’ making and their impact on action movies […]
As my friend Curtis and I both despised what J.J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof and their team did to Star Trek with their “re-boot” (more like a boot to the original’s crotch) in 2009, it would be fair to ask why the heck we decided to go and see the sequel, Star Trek Into Darkness, on […]