A teenage girl’s long, eventful night on the town becomes a fantastical adventure in Night is Short, Walk on Girl (Japan, 2017), an animated feature from Japanese filmmaker Masaaki Yuasa. A high school sophomore, known only as “The Girl with Black Hair” (or Otome), joins a pair of harmless con artists for a night on […]
As fans of the cult comic book Hellblazer will tell you, Keanu Reeves doesn’t look or act much like comic book anti-hero John Constantine in Constantine (2005), the big screen version of the story of the streetwise supernatural hustler. He does, however, cut a memorable figure with his lockjaw resolve and iconic wardrobe, playing the […]
Barbarella (1968), a campy psychedelic romp produced by Italian Dino de Laurentiis, directed by French eroticist Roger Vadim, adapted from a risqué French comic strip by American satirist Terry Southern, and featuring an international cast, was Buck Rogers reworked as a sex kitten in space for the 1960s culture of free love and pop art. […]
Here’s what’s new and ready to stream now on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO Max, Disney+, video-on-demand, and other streaming services … Happy New Year! There are no new major movies or TV shows debuting this week (let’s face it, the services brought out their big releases in the weeks leading up to Christmas) […]
Hayao Miyazaki is one of Japan’s living treasures, a beloved filmmaker whose animated films number among the most beautiful and most enchanting productions ever drawn by hand. In this day of CGI productions, the aging artist still personally draws his key frames and defining characters, with a love and craft that comes through every frame. […]
Big (1988) arrived in theaters amidst a spate of films about adults and children swapping bodies. There’s no swap involved in this story—an adolescent boy named Josh makes a wish that he was big on a midway fortune-telling machine and wakes up in the body of Tom Hanks—but this warm-hearted comedy was by far the […]
Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (Finland, 2010) comes from the land of the original Father Christmas but he’s no cuddly old man who hands out presents at Christmas. This Santa Claus, who has been buried in a man-made glacier like a wooly mammoth, is a child-snatching demon who punishes the naughty with the help of […]
When you see a film like Frankenweenie (2012), Tim Burton’s animated reworking of his early live-action short, how can you think of Burton as anything but a big kid working with, as Orson Welles put it, the biggest toy train set a kid ever had? In Burton’s case, simply substitute a Frankenstein’s laboratory of a […]
The Adam Sandler formula hasn’t changed much in thirty years. It’s basically a few variations on the arrested adolescent turned underdog hero: the self-made jerk (Happy Gilmore), the underachiever and proud of it (Big Daddy), the sheltered local yokel unprepared for the social world (The Waterboy). Little Nicky (2000) falls in the latter category, and […]
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Steven Spielberg’s suburban fairy tale for kids who think they are too hip to believe in fairies, is as glorious as ever decades after its debut. Henry Thomas is Elliot, an emotionally bruised kid suffering under his parents’ separation who finds another lonely, lost soul, a benevolent alien left behind when […]
