Highly Recommended Made during a particularly bleak period for Hammer Films, Twins of Evil (1972) is a pleasant surprise. While still exhibiting the same desperate components of the company’s other horror films of the period – gratuitous nudity, an obviously low budget, and feeble attempts to create a new franchise/horror star – its screenplay is much more intriguing than most early-’70s Hammers …
Highly Recommended THE FILM: Please Note: The images used here are taken from promotional materials and the 2009 Criterion DVD edition , not the Blu-ray edition under review. In his debut film, 1990’s Metropolitan , it was magical the way writer/director Whit Stillman unexpectedly rendered so captivating and charming the humorous, touching postgraduate romantic peccadilloes of young, ultra …
The production designer for ParaNorman talks about his obsession with Lego and how stop motion animation has changed in the last 15 years.
Highly Recommended THE SHOW: Please Note: The stills used here are taken from the series’ promotional materials, not the Blu-ray edition under review. The second season of HBO’s New Orleans drama Treme takes the series into a comfortable stride, settling deeper into the characters and the city’s culture and proving that David Simon ( The Wire , Generation Kill ) is one of the more expansive …
Highly Recommended The Movie: A lost Ernst Lubitsch spectacle, one of the last two filmsthat he made in Germany before going to Hollywood, has been found,restored,and released on a lovely Blu-ray disc. The film is Das Weib des Pharao or The Loves of Pharaoh as it’s knownin English, is a large, impressive film filled with thousands of extrasandsome very striking sets (including a Sphinx!), but it …
If I start talking about a movie called La guerre des etoiles , or about one of its main characters called “Dark Vador,†busy building a space station called “L’etoile noire†which is later on, for no apparent reason, re-branded “ L’etoile de la mort ,†does it ring a bell?
Recommended The Series: To start – a recap of the series blatantly swiped from the review of the Season One Blu-ray set: Created by Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady, The Big Bang Theory is based around the exploits of two roommates, Leonard Hofstadter (Johnny Galecki) and Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons), who share an apartment together and work as physicists at the California Institute of Technology …
Skip It THE FILM: Channing Tatum is in demand these days after stripping for Steven Soderbergh and fighting crime undercover with Jonah Hill. Step Up , released back in 2006, is not up to par with Tatum’s more recent films, and plays like a bland knockoff of the already-middle-of-the-road Save the Last Dance .
Skip It THE MOVIE: “C’mon guys, that was funny.” -Stiffler “Maybe in high school it was funny.” -Jim And there you have the trouble with American Reunion in a two-line nutshell, with this film that has gone to a tremendous amount of trouble to gather all of the players (no matter how minor) from the hit 1999 comedy, and has gone to no trouble at all to give them anything funny or interesting to …
Highly Recommended THE FILM: Chariots of Fire is a film I had seen parodied long before I actually saw it. The film’s ubiquitous title sequence of runners on a beach and its synthesizer-heavy score is known by many unfamiliar with the complete work. The Oscar-winning drama is quite good, too, and tells the story of two runners in 1920s Britain who deal with anti-Semitism and religious conviction …