The film noir genre, by its very nature, is a genre both stylized and rough. While sharp costume design, shadows, hard boiled dialogue, Dutch angles and hazy sunlit cinematography are part of the package deal, it's only there to balance out the overall seedy sleaziness of the sto... Read More »
I wish the brain trust behind Gangster Squad wouldn’t have watched so many movies. Then, perhaps, they wouldn’t have been so dead set on trying to squeeze every tired gangster-movie line, look, idea, or result into a two-hour window. Gangster Squad has promise at times, thanks ... Read More »
A mainstay of kid culture in the UK from his successful run in Francesca Simon’s novel series and its hugely popular animated TV adaptation, Horrid Henry makes his big screen debut in the aptly titled Horrid Henry: The Movie, scripted by show producer Lucinda Whiteley. Seeing the... Read More »
“In this space everyone can hear you scream”. It’s a clever tagline atop the gorgeously old-style sci-fi poster for Crawlspace, at once inviting warranted comparison to the Alien franchise and suggesting the crippling claustrophobia so increasingly popular in modern horror half-b... Read More »
Would the sheer immensity of a show business fortune motivate one therewith blessed to share the wealth with friends of old? Such is the supposition of Dan Rosen’s Freeloaders, an ill-mannered comedy that casts Counting Crows frontman Adam Duritz as a warped version of himself, t... Read More »
There are actually some clever moments in Gangster Squad, mostly thanks to Ryan Gosling, who is quickly establishing himself as one of the best leading men in Hollywood. But those are few and far between, overpowered by a sense that director Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland, 30 Minute... Read More »
Music and film are media in which the element of time is distorted. In film, the time it takes to watch the film intertwines with the (most often) truncated time line of the narrative. Flashbacks offer glimpses of the past in the present. The end of the film is the future of the ... Read More »
Describing the sheer, absolute, unequivocal brilliance of Zero Dark Thirty is difficult, because its many virtues are almost intangible. Obviously, this film is the result of concrete, seamless, next-level work by a long list of cinema professionals. But there is an energy, a cad... Read More »
A great deal of the appeal of Sons of Anarchy lies in the antagonism of its protagonists: not only in their criminality does the audience experience the thrill of vicarious existence, but also in the sustained hope that, beneath the violently nihilistic chauvinism they exude, the... Read More »
Takashi Miike’s Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai is an oft grizzly, yet surprisingly restrained remake of Masaki Kobayashi’s 1962 masterpiece (Harakiri) that illustrates the timeless nature of the tale and the perennially dehumanizing effects of ritual and bureaucracy. Miike’s vers... Read More »
At the risk of starting off with too grand a statement, Texas Chainsaw 3D is a truly rare filmic anomaly. However, let us be clear that this assertion does not reflect in any way on the film’s merits as a horror movie or even as an overly competent movie… Cause it’s pretty much m... Read More »
Since the earliest days of cinema, when Auguste and Louis Lumière captured the simple sight of workers leaving a factory at the end of a day’s work, film has been used to document the world around, to capture reality in the full scope of its realness. The medium may have rapidly ... Read More »
