Cloverfield manages to encourage us to hold on to those we love and enjoy any day that isn’t the last day of our life. It manages to do so on the run, which it owes to a snappy script and Miller’s motor-mouth, his comedic tension, his well-meaning worry.
Spielberg sends us back to our childhood and hopes we still find it romantic. We do.
Christophe Gans admirably refers to Jean Cocteau’s 1946 La Belle et La Bête while presenting a version of the fairytale that should read as authentic even to those who have only seen the Disney one. What he does not do is capture the original’s symbolic poetry or frame the old pieces in such a way that their retelling is a revelation.
I’ve seen great filmmakers make bad movies. But I’ve never seen them willingly create the antimatter to their own style. With only the earnest request of his audience to question and unravel everything they believe about their brittle capitalistic existence, Shyamalan instead has made a film that makes me question and unravel everything I believe about Shyamalan.
Moonraker skips the part where all is as it seems, a noble approach for a film in a formula series (they might have made it stick as self-aware humor, but even that would have been too “wink-wink” with Moore at the Helm). “You appear,” says Drax after Bond’s fourth miraculous escape, “with the tedious inevitability of an unloved season.” Here is an oddity: a franchise that doesn’t know it knows itself.
Anderson saw Sandler’s rage and made a movie to justify it. The magic that results never gets old.
Suicide Squad is a petty crime. It is a work of stupid badness, clumsy as a graffiti scrawl, and less motivated on a world stage where it hopes to earn $800 million than actual scrawls I’ve seen, on the bottoms of bridges where they expect to earn nothing but contempt.
How else would the smartest screenwriter of the century make a story about losing your mind, except by making it literal? A romance that counts as all of them.
Hulk is flawed and huge and bold. It’s about the monster’s curse of being a man. It’s a superhero film that means something.
What DreamWorks have done with Ghost in the Shell, if it is a cultural invasion, is more potent than catering to an international market (or their idea of it). The new film is an inversion of its material, to an extent that its entire symbolic framework has been hacked by the virus of three-act Western superhero stories.
Its power and influence is all in a performance of a modern myth. Dark, apocalyptic, and unforgettable.
By remaining outside after dark, Kubo invokes the inevitable quest for three sacred pieces of armor so that he may defeat the Moon King. Kubo weaves its story with the mythologist Joseph Campbell’s pattern, which he called the “monomyth,” by telling a story about a boy and his Mother as though it represented all boys and all Mothers.
Everyone has their own agenda. No one has a straight answer. The birth of noir.