At the root of the best modern sex comedies and movies about arrested adolescents learning to man up is male friendships, something that is always taken for granted in the same films. What’s most fun about I Love You, Man (2009), is not the way it skews the usual perspective of male friendship, observing it […]
Tag: J.K. Simmons
‘April and the Extraordinary World’ – Steampunk animated adventure on Netflix
April and the Extraordinary World (France, 2015), inspired by the graphic novels of the great French comic artist Jacques Tardi, is a steampunk adventure set in an alternate reality Paris where the World Wars never occurred, electricity was never discovered, twin Eiffel Towers anchor a direct cable-car route to Berlin, and the smoke that powers […]
Sam Raimi’s ‘Spider-Man’ – The original big screen webslinger on Hulu
Superhero movies have been a big screen staple ever since Superman first flew through his first animated adventure in 1940. But for all the glory of Richard Donner’s majestic 1978 Superman and the kooky dark weirdness of Tim Burton’s Batman films, it took comic book fan-turned-fan-boy director Sam Raimi to capture the graphic thrills and […]
‘Juno’ on VOD
Juno (2007), the feel good film of the pregnant teenager comedy genre, was the success story of 2007, a low-budget comedy with an offbeat sensibility that was embraced by a youth audience and propelled into a mainstream hit. Ellen Page is impetuous and funny as the smart-mouthed high-school goofball who finds herself pregnant, the result […]