By Joe Shelton The Long Dumb Road treads one of the most trodden trails in American movies: the one where two mismatched travelers find themselves thrown together and, ostensibly, learn something from one another. The best-loved examples are probably Planes, Trains and Automobiles, or if you’re an antiquarian, It Happened One Night. Maybe the Road To…
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By Kari Bowles It must be said upfront that I am an ardent fan of Hayao Miyazaki; when asked who I consider the greatest living film director, I offer up Miyazaki. From his feature debut The Castle of Cagliostro in 1979, to the Academy Award winning Spirited Away in 2002, up to The Wind Rises…
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By Kari Bowles Following the success of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca(1940), Hollywood saw a trend toward opulent period pictures dripping with atmosphere for the rest of the decade. Some films, following Hitchcock’s lead, directly channeled nineteenth century Gothic literature, such as Robert Stevenson’s version of Jane Eyre (1944), or George Cukor’s Gaslight(1944). Others were literal ghost…
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The term “stranger than fiction” gets bandied around so often in reference to documentaries about human subjects that it’s lost all meaning. And besides, fiction isn’t all that strange anymore, is it? Or rather, its become SO strange (Dr. Strange, perhaps) that the collective big budget output of Hollywood resembles nothing so much as stack…
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I grew up with Will Ferrell on Saturday Night Live. In those ancient times, post-AOL but pre-Google, call it the Ask Jeeves years, Will Ferrell was pretty hilarious. He yelled and chewed the scenery, something like an absurdist Adam Sandler. And when Anchorman came out, I was still a dewy youth of 17, and consequently…
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In “Prospect”, necessity is the mother of invention. Like the early Star Wars movies, it exists in a universe that feels cobbled together out of pieces in bad repair, or at least the part of the galaxy we get to see feels that way. We’re introduced to a pair of space freelancers, the kind that…
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“The Clovehitch Killer” could have been a sort of dumb comedy, and its tale of a 16 year old boy who begins to suspect that his father (the local Boy Scout troupe leader) is an infamous serial killer could have been exploited for cheap, if black-humored, laughs. But “The Clovehitch Killer” is a different kind…
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Let’s get the review portion of the review out of the way early; “Overlord” is pretty good, and if you like zombie horror, WW2 flicks, or action-pulp video games like “Wolfenstein”, then you’re going to enjoy “Overlord”. Its pleasingly splattery, and it spends its comparably thrifty budget on some nicely lurid special effects. Ok, there…
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It really makes you wonder why Disney, ostensibly one of our cultural gatekeepers supposedly providing wholesome, kid-friendly entertainment, chose to make Ralph Breaks the Internet, and not something less potentially morally compromising, like “Ralph Starts a Ponzi Scheme” or “Ralph Runs for Congress.” Making a kids’ movie set on the internet seems like almost as good…
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First off, if you haven’t seen Dario Argento’s “Suspiria” but have the unmitigated gall to call yourself a fan of horror, then you need to correct yourself before you wreck yourself. Whether or not you’re a fan of Argento’s brand of lurid neon “giallo” slashers, “Suspiria” is a film worth taking in, if nothing else…
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