The requirements for a good sequel are fairly clear. The audience wants more of the same, but they also want something different. A change of tone, a progression of the characters, a raise in stake, or whatever transformation a filmmaker … Continue reading REVIEW: The Expendables 2 (2012)
Biographical pictures are a dime a dozen in Hollywood; much less common is the autobiographical picture, in which a filmmaker adapts events of their own lives. It must require a major ego to film one’s own life for a paying … Continue reading REVIEW: All That Jazz (1979)
Carlo Collodi’s 1883 novel The Adventures of Pinocchio is one of the world’s most famous and best-selling works of children’s literature, and as such has long been a source for film and television adaptation. Walt Disney’s 1940 animated adaptation dominates, of course, … Continue reading REVIEW: The Adventures of Pinocchio (1972)
Thomas Vinterberg’s new comedy-drama is a striking piece of work. It is genuinely funny in all of the right places, yet often feels too awkward to laugh at due to its overwhelming patina of melancholy. At the same time that … Continue reading REVIEW: Another Round (2020)
It is easy to simply glance at a film like Power Rangers and skip over it completely, and in all honesty there is nothing wrong with that plan. It is a remake of a television series adaptation of another television series, none of … Continue reading REVIEW: Power Rangers (2017)
Ric Roman Waugh’s Greenland emerges as 2021’s first major surprise: yet another large-scale disaster movie, it leaps head-and-shoulders above its genre to become the strongest film of its type since Michael Bay’s Armageddon back in 1998. On the same day that it becomes … Continue reading REVIEW: Greenland (2020)
Six friends go hiking along Virginia’s Appalachian trail, but their curiosity soon leads to deadly consequences in Wrong Turn – a new thriller directed by Mike P. Nelson (The Domestics). It is technically a remake of the 2003 horror film … Continue reading REVIEW: Wrong Turn (2021)
Jodie Foster and Martin Sheen star in The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, a mostly superb little Canadian thriller that sits uncomfortably between character-based drama and exploitation picture. It was released in 1976, and directed by Nicolas Gessner from … Continue reading REVIEW: The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976)
Since the mid-1980s Studio Ghibli has been the world’s premier production house for animated films. Led by directors Hayao Miyazaki and the late Isao Takahata, Ghibli has produced more than 20 features in an unparalleled run of creative successes. They … Continue reading REVIEW: Earwig and the Witch (2020)
Readers should note that this essay substantially reveals the storyline of the film. When English-speaking audiences discovered Japanese cinema in the early 1950s, it was through a series of acclaimed period dramas including Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon and Kenji Mizoguchi’s The … Continue reading “Do you want me that much?” | Gate of Hell (1953)
