Porco Rosso opens with a dogfight in the skies that is at once evocative of old war movies and yet seemingly from a completely different world altogether. This dogfight involves air pirates, a group of kidnapped kids, air fortresses, and a cacophony of slapstick action making the fact that our titular hero in this air rescue, …
The first time I heard the fog horn in The Lighthouse it jolted me out of my seat. By around the sixth time I heard it, I was ready to throw something at the screen, such was the horn's incessant ability to get under my skin. By the end of the movie however that horn had …
Thanks in part to the ineptitude of the bulk of latter-day "found footage" movies, it is easy to heap derision on Ghostwatch and The Blair Witch Project, two movies that in many ways pioneered the genre. In the latter case, the fact that it became such a phenomenal cultural touchstone in 1999 also meant that it achieved the level …
Continue reading Double Feature: Ghostwatch and The Blair Witch Project
Early on in Lorene Scafaria's Hustlers we follow Destiny (Constance Wu) in a single steadicam shot as she prepares for her first night at a high-end strip club in New York, the moment evoking Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas in the best possible way. Moments later, we are given an unforgettable introduction to the club's star Ramona (Jennifer Lopez) with a show-stopping …
For the last half-decade or so, cinephiles and Quentin Tarantino-fans have been sifting the tea leaves with every new Tarantino release to see if he was looking to stop after making ten movies, a claim he has insisted on multiple times. With Once Upon A Time ... In Hollywood, his presumably penultimate film, we finally get …
Continue reading Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood (Big Screen Review)
(As the title above suggests, this review will contain SPOILERS. Proceed at your own discretion.) There is no more an unenviable task than trying to stick the landing on a finale. This is even more so when that finale happens to be the capstone to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), a sprawling 11 year and 22 movie …
Look, I understand how you might be feeling. This is the seventh Spider-Man movie since 2002 and the fourth reboot. Your base instinct is to ask if another Spider-Man movie is at all necessary. Well in this case, the answer is unequivocally yes. From Phil Lord and Christopher Miller – the minds that brought you 21 Jump Street, The Lego Movie, and theoretically …
Continue reading Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Big Screen Review)
After winning awards for "Best Picture" and "Best Director" for his superb 2014 drama 12 Years a Slave, Steve McQueen could've made just about any movie as his follow-up. Luckily for us he decided to make Widows, a commercial heist film that deftly balances thrills with poignancy and is highly entertaining while remaining firmly grounded in the …
Public discussions about a film's general quality tends to fall into a clear-cut binary. Either the movie elicits an enjoyable emotion like joy, excitement, inspiration, awe, or love in a viewer, and therefore gets called a "good" movie. Or the movie fails to elicit those emotions and conjures up negative emotions like boredom, anger, anxiety, …
So as I stated last week, I'm in mass catch-up mode before I put out my first edition of the Best of 2018 list (Part 1 here). So here's this weeks round-up: THE DEATH OF STALIN dir. Armando Iannucci From The Thick of It to In The Loop to his current HBO series Veep, Armando Iannucci has perfected the …
Homebody Movies 