Godzilla II: King of the Monsters is a Disastrous Failure
This is a film about mega-monsters wreaking havoc at a catastrophic scale, but there’s no weight to this thing; it’s limp and incoherent.
There’s Something Magical About The Shape of Water
The Shape of Water is a flamboyant fantasy yet deeply human; old-fashioned yet profoundly modern; filmed with a palate preferring murky, oceanic greens yet somehow bursting with light and life.
Paddington 2 (2017)
Keaton, Chaplin, Tati, Lloyd – and, now, Paddington Bear.
x+y (2014)
x+y demonstrates that a documentarian’s skills don’t always translate into the world of fiction films. Director Morgan Matthews has been making documentaries since 2002, but this film is his first foray into fictional features. x+y takes inspiration from his 2007 film, Beautiful Young Minds, telling the story of Nathan, an autistic, talented teenage mathematician (Asa…
Godzilla (2014)
Godzilla is an anti-blockbuster, repurposing and reinventing the grammar of big budget disaster films to produce a film that is aesthetically and ideologically compelling, if inconsistently entertaining. A dense evocation of the tragic scale of environmental and nuclear cataclysms, the film’s steadfast refusal to focus on its human characters, instead contemplating global devastation, is hardly…
The 86th Academy Awards – Predictions and Thoughts
I’m not really that interested in getting too caught up in the Oscars fol-de-rol that consumes the critical community around this time of year. I read a lot about the Academy Awards because, well, it’s people getting passionate about film! People arguing emphatically about which film is better and the industry, about who will win…
