I watch Grave Of The Vampire every couple of years—it’s one of only a handful of movies I’ve watched over and over. Occasionally, you go back to movie that you loved as a kid, and realize how little you knew about filmmaking. When I revisited “Frogs,” one of the slew of 1970’s man vs. nature…
DetailsAbsolutely Anything is Terry Jones’ first feature screenplay (written here with 65 year old Gavin Scott) since Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride in 1996 and before that, Erik The Viking in 1989. Those are also the last two features he’s directed. These yawning gaps present themselves in the form of horrendously stale jokes and awfully pedestrian – bordering on ameteurish –…
DetailsIn 2010, I wrote of El Secreto De Sus Ojos, “It is a superb film, an incredibly rich and moving crime thriller telling a story both in the present and twenty-five years in the past, utilising the streets of Buenos Aires to maximum effect and deploying some of Argentina’s finest actors … [It] transcends its crime-novel beginnings…
DetailsIf you don’t like your movies to celebrate criminals, avoid Legend, which treats London’s notorious Kray twins as if they were tragic heroes. Which should be pretty obvious by the title. In yet another stroke of awesome acting, Tom Hardy plays both twins, Reggie and Ronnie, and he does it so well that you seriously do forget…
DetailsOscar-winning doco maker Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) has made a revealing and sweet film about Malala Yousafzai and her dad Ziauddin, which can’t help but be thirty percent or so more resonant seen in the week of the Paris attacks. Malala was shot in the face by the Taliban as Paris has metaphorically been shot in…
DetailsSimon Pegg is a talented and successful man of the movies. Besides Spaced and “the Cornetto trilogy” of Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World’s End – his almost always excellent collaborations with writer / director Edgar Wright – and his occupation of second-tier funnyman in the Mission Impossible, Star Trek and (new) Star Wars franchises, he’s also a seriously well-endowed screenwriter, including…
DetailsKristen Stewart last showed her chops head to head with Julianne Moore in Still Alice; Moore won an Oscar. I don’t think Juliette Binoche is going to win an Oscar for going head-to-head with Stewart for Clouds of Sils Maria, Olivier Assayas’s new enigmatic, occasionally frustrating but ultimately wonderful new film, and I think the reason is that Binoche…
DetailsDaniel Craig’s final film as James Bond is a visually dark, contemplative, adult affair that seeks to conclude a four-film arc, marking out Craig’s tenure as a sort of self-contained series within the larger franchise. Its plot directly links it to the previous three films, and there’s no doubt that this approach, given that Craig…
DetailsThe Blueblack Hussar starts with Adam walking up the steps of a Victorian Monument in the present day, and then cuts to footage of him doing the same as a young man. He still looks great, and the timing of this documentary is apt, as Ant’s “Antmusic” is featured on the “Ant-Man” soundtrack. As symphonic…
DetailsAny film that falls into the ilk of Season of the Witch with Nicolas Cage is immediately on my watch list. Yes, that is basically shouting from the rooftops that I’m either an idiot, or simply out of my mind. I can’t even really say that some movies are so bad they need to be…
Details