| Latest alternate takes
| Watchmen | "Adaptation is an extremely important part of the American cinema. Not exactly its own genre, it is at least its own category... Whenever a particularly critically respected, or - equally - deeply loved, novel gets adapted to film, this fact once again becomes a prominent issue..." Read this article
Published on Tue May 5 19:42:57 2009 |  | |
| Import/Export | "From the first days of cinema and the Lumiere brothers’ Arrival of a Train cinema has always enjoyed a complex relationship with reality. The camera captures truthfully what is in front of it, yet when projected onto a cinema screen it becomes a reflection of that event that can sometimes be convincing enough to be accepted as real..." Read this article
Published on Sat Mar 14 17:46:54 2009 |  | |
| High School Musical 3: Senior Year | "This Alternate Take will first deconstruct, as it were, the film’s fantasy of space and place, criticising the specific ways in which it departs from what we might for convenience’s sake call reality. It will then offer an antidote to all this negativity, restoring the film to our good graces through an analysis of its own self-awareness and self-reflexivity in this regard..." Read this article
Published on Sun Feb 8 14:03:51 2009 |  | |
| Man on Wire | "In his Minnesota Declaration Werner Herzog declares, 'there are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization'..." Read this article
Published on Sat Oct 25 15:42:51 2008 |  | |
| The Dark Knight | "The Dark Knight is not a great film. Contrary to the hype – hysteria, even - that has surrounded it, it is instead simply a frustrating, absorbing, and at times brilliant comic book movie. Does it deserve the kind words my short review gave it? Yes, but only just..." Read this article
Published on Wed Sep 17 16:42:27 2008 |  | |
| Iron Man | "I want to talk a little about the tricky question of ‘realism’. It is clear that Iron Man isn’t anything like what we would normally call a ‘realistic’ film, for the simple reason that it is a superhero movie... As I said in my short review though, Iron Man does nevertheless contain elements that that make it feel perhaps more ‘realistic’ than some other superhero films..." Read this article
Published on Mon Jun 30 10:23:54 2008 |  | |
| Cashback | "I want to talk about how Cashback follows safe, predicable formulas that we are so very used to seeing in modern British films, and also think a little about the film in relation to the time at which it has arrived: a moment in which British films seem to be in something of a dire situation..." Read this article
Published on Mon Jun 30 10:14:06 2008 |  | |
| Funny Games U.S. | "Firstly I want to discuss the film that both versions essentially are at their core: the self-conscious interpretation of the horror genre. Secondly, I’ll talk a little about the film that only the second version is: the ‘shot by shot’ remake..." Read this article
Published on Sun May 18 20:58:16 2008 |  | |
| Cloverfield | "What Cloverfield's promotional strategy did was to almost shun the established star system, and fully embrace a more organic and grass-roots method of marketing. Integrating the film's trailers and characters into the labyrinth of home-made user-generated content was a masterstroke..." Read this article
Published on Fri Mar 21 22:47:03 2008 |  | |
| Juno | "Juno is, like it or not, rather emblematic of the 'quirky new wave's current incarnation, and, thus, in this Alternate Take I will be looking at it in this light..." Read this article
Published on Fri Mar 7 17:24:29 2008 |  | |
| I'm Not There | "I’m Not There seems to me to be a film that is - if not purely, then at least to a significant degree - about issues of representation. This Alternate Take will be concerned mainly with identifying and exploring some of these issues..." Read this article
Published on Tue Feb 19 13:09:42 2008 |  | |
| No Country For Old Men | "In this Alternate Take I want to think about aspects of No Country for Old Men under three main headings: landscape, tone and response, and structure..." Read this article
Published on Sun Feb 17 12:47:19 2008 |  | |
| I am Legend | "Simply put, I am Legend’s biggest problem is that it does not know quite what it wants to be. It moves waywardly from genre to sub-genre, flickering between numerous styles and tones. As well as this, the mise en scène is unappealing in its look, and flatly obvious in its functions; however, probably the most interesting of the movie’s failings is in the casting choice of Will Smith..." " Read this article
Published on Fri Feb 8 15:09:28 2008 |  | |
| The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford | "This western identifies itself as ‘revisionist’ almost by default. By this I mean that, by largely avoiding some of the more ‘traditional’ pleasures of the western genre (e.g.: action set-pieces, travel narratives, goal-oriented characters, etc.) it aligns itself with a type of western that is more concerned with deconstructing the myths of the old west than with innocently presenting them..." Read this article
Published on Thu Dec 20 00:51:37 2007 |  | |
| The Darjeeling Limited | "An outstanding scene in The Darjeeling Limited has the brothers waking up onboard the train on which they journey across India lost in a rural backwater. 'How can the train be lost? It’s on rails', complains Jack. This scene demonstrates how unconvincing the film is as a road movie and how it excels as a rail movie..." Read this article
Published on Mon Dec 3 13:05:42 2007 |  | |
| Knocked Up | -Knocked Up has been critically acclaimed to degree that is unusual for a mainstream Hollywood comedy, a fact that has predictably raised the hackles of some more ardently ‘highbrow’ critics and cinéphiles... The film is certainly not without its problems, but I will concern myself here mainly with what I consider its successes, giving particular attention to its vision of gender...- Read this article
Published on Wed Nov 14 11:15:50 2007 |  | |
| Superbad | "There are various levels of nostalgia flowing through Superbad. Firstly, it is full of odd references to the 70s, to the point at which it almost seems like a love letter to a bygone era, despite being firmly set in the present day. Secondly, the film also displays considerable nostalgia for one’s teenage years..." Read this article
Published on Thu Oct 25 17:51:49 2007 |  | |
| The Kingdom | "The Kingdom is likely Hollywood’s first - and, I’m sure, not its last - earnest attempt to catch up and depict the current situation within a more-or-less simple generic framework - in this case, the action-thriller. How successful does this strategy prove here?..." Read this article
Published on Wed Oct 17 15:23:46 2007 |  | |
| Atonement | "The movie sabotages itself in its insistence on keeping that which is most obviously ‘clever,’ rather than rich and resonant, about McEwan’s novel..." Read this article
Published on Wed Oct 17 15:22:43 2007 |  | |
| Waitress | "Waitress, which centres very strongly around Jenna, employs numerous devices for communicating her thoughts and feelings. The movie is also very interested, though, in the various ways in which its characters try to communicate with one another, within the world of the movie. These two sets of strategies will be considered together in this Alternate Take..." Read this article
Published on Tue Sep 25 12:28:19 2007 |  | |
| Run, Fat Boy, Run | "Why are American filmmakers so obsessed with the Gherkin building? In American films about London, people work there, live there, and park their Union Flag-emblazed New Mini Coopers outside it... It’s a different kind of Britishness than usually gets skimmed across the pond: industry captaining, design-conscious, contemporary and urban. So should the British be grateful?..." Read this article
Published on Tue Sep 25 11:40:45 2007 |  | |
| The Simpsons Movie | "If the television series has built up an image of Homer as the average American man, the film shows him in a slightly different light: here Homer seems not just the archetypal average American man, but seems instead a virtual allegory for the United States as a whole..." Read this article
Published on Tue Aug 28 12:06:47 2007 |  | |
| Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix | "In this Alternate Take I will focus on an aspect of the Harry Potter franchise that has troubled me since it began back in 2001: the ways the stories are told, and, more specifically, the narrative structures of the films..." Read this article
Published on Sat Aug 11 19:06:42 2007 |  | |
| Hostel: Part II | "The films belonging to the recent trend of ‘torture-horror’ have been widely criticised for their supposedly excessive violence, for their victimisation of women, and for their lack of traditional horror movie pleasures, such as suspense. As is always the case, the truth is always likely to be more complex, and is likely to vary depending on which particular film is under discussion..." Read this article
Published on Sun Jul 22 18:20:27 2007 |  | |
| Fast Food Nation | "The main business of this alternate take will be an exploration of what might be termed ‘the rhetoric of filmic fiction’... I will focus (like the movie itself) upon scenes of humans in social situations, and upon how Linklater and Schlosser present and arrange this material in the service of a particular point of view..." Read this article
Published on Fri Jun 1 10:46:43 2007 |  | |
| Spider-Man 3 | "I won’t trot out the tired, predictable comparisons to the best threequels of the past, such as The Empire Strikes Back... I will use an example of more relevance, namely Sam Raimi’s only other ‘part three’, Army of Darkness (1993), otherwise known as the third Evil Dead film..." Read this article
Published on Fri Jun 1 10:41:13 2007 |  | |
| Sunshine | "Like the recent Hot Fuzz (2007), Sunshine is a British-made film with an international appeal. Also like Hot Fuzz, it is a distinctly and self-consciously ‘international’ film, aimed at more than just a predominantly British market..." Read this article
Published on Wed May 16 16:19:30 2007 |  | |
| Reign Over Me | "To some, the fact Reign Over Me is getting little critical comment for its subject matter, is somewhat surprising. Before United 93 (2006) was even made, it was the topic of much discussion about the ethics of filmmaking and consideration for the families it was portraying..." Read this article
Published on Thu May 3 12:12:12 2007 |  | |
| Breach | "The more acclaim Breach gets, the better. When it was released recently in the US, the film went under the radar. In the United States it opened wide in February but had little press coverage and only was seen in larger cities. Trailers made the movie look like a thriller in the vein of the Bourne movies. Most critics liked it, but none truly raved about it..." Read this article
Published on Wed Apr 18 12:53:00 2007 |  | |
| The Hills Have Eyes 2 | "The road-horror has, at its heart, a basic plotline from which variations are spun. This plotline is inherited from the primary Warnmarchen (warning tale) of the European Middle Ages that structures Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel and countless other tales: the myth of the youth, lost in the wilderness, who encounters a monster..." Read this article
Published on Tue Apr 10 16:55:25 2007 |  | |
| Old Joy | "Old Joy taps into a vein which has run through American art for centuries. From Emerson to Walt Whitman, from Hemingway and the Lost Generation, through the Beats, New York Punks, and Generation Xers, disillusionment with wider society and the (im)possibility of escape, has been a theme in alternative American books, paintings, and records, for decades..." Read this article
Published on Tue Apr 3 13:01:57 2007 |  | |
| The Illusionist | "It is almost pointless to compare The Illusionist to The Prestige, since the latter is manifestly the superior film in almost every way. What is worthy of discussion, however, are the different ways the two films use magic and illusion as themes with which to convey a story..." Read this article
Published on Sun Mar 25 23:24:26 2007 |  | |
| The Fountain | "The Fountain is the latest - and most representative - victim of the rise of what seems to be a troubling recent trend in mainstream film journalism. A number of unrepentantly ambitious auteur films over the last year or so have come up against the stumbling block of being labelled ‘pretentious’, and have been dismissed by a larger cross-section of critics than predictable..." Read this article
Published on Thu Mar 22 18:41:58 2007 |  | |
| 300 | "The general take on 300 is that to review it is to deal with new possibilities instead of older traditions. But 300 isn’t groundbreaking enough to warrant new ideals in criticism: so much of the film is really quite generic..." Read this article
Published on Thu Mar 22 18:28:33 2007 |  | |
| Zodiac | "With Zodiac, Fincher has made the detective film relevant and has distanced himself from the limitations of his past films. Fight Club (1999) consisted of intricate shots that were surrounded by special effects. Zodiac, on the other hand, has a simple, methodical approach to scenes and storytelling that reaches for a clinical, detached tone, and realism carries the story..." Read this article
Published on Sun Mar 18 11:37:07 2007 |  | |
| Hot Fuzz | "Hot Fuzz is a ‘cult’ film of the highest order, aimed at a British audience of young men and students who know their Hollywood movies as well as their British comedy. However, it is also aimed squarely at that specific demographic in America as well. This tension between British and American style and culture defines the film as a whole..." Read this article
Published on Sun Mar 18 11:08:09 2007 |  | |
| Letters From Iwo Jima | "When Eastwood went into Flags of Our Fathers (2006) and Letters from Iwo Jima, he was riding off the critical and financial highs of Million Dollar Baby (2005). He was given extravagant budgets because it was felt he could do no wrong. For the critics of his previous efforts, nothing could prepare them for the new-found depths he would reach in these films..." Read this article
Published on Sun Mar 11 19:39:21 2007 |  | |
| For Your Consideration | "For Your Consideration, although similar to its predecessors, differs in the decision to drop the use of the documentary crew. It may only be a small detail, especially as the tone of the film is similar to the past Guest films, however it does mean that the film loses something..." Read this article
Published on Wed Mar 7 14:16:35 2007 |  | |
| Venus | "British cinema - as a phrase or concept - is currently broadly unusually popular, especially since the recent Oscar nominations. Very few critics, however, have thought to mention Roger Michell or Hanif Kureishi as purveyors of constantly engaging, sometimes breathtaking pieces of recent British cinema..." Read this article
Published on Sun Feb 18 18:18:50 2007 |  | |
| Smokin' Aces | "Maybe it is time for a newly developed genre to get some historical perspective. Smokin’ Aces does not announce a major achievement in the over-stylized action film, but it does announce that it is here to stay, and does suggest that a stylistic trend has now turned into a genre..." Read this article
Published on Mon Feb 12 19:29:48 2007 |  | |
| Apocalypto | "Unusual in some surface respects, but still predominantly highly conventional, Apocalypto is a misguided, muddled film, with pretensions far above its station... Its script is severely lacking, and is a genreless missmash of ideas with a tone so uneven you begin to wonder if you’re even watching the finished product..." Read this article
Published on Sun Feb 4 19:03:00 2007 |  | |
| Stranger Than Fiction | "Many critics have noted the debt that Stranger Than Fiction clearly owes to the scripts of Charlie Kaufman... The comparison, however, is ultimately a damning one, and unavoidably points to the perceivable gulf between a writer who truly understands the fundamental workings of the cinematic medium, and one who lacks the determination to see his concepts through to their conclusions..." Read this article
Published on Sun Jan 28 19:10:04 2007 |  | |
| The Last King of Scotland | "The Last King of Scotland is somewhere between a realist historical drama and a modern version of Apocalypse Now. A dark, twisted morality tale, full of violence and political instability, whilst grounded in a very real world, Kevin Macdonald’s film really is a descent into the heart of darkness..." Read this article
Published on Fri Jan 19 15:58:17 2007 |  | |
| Pan's Labyrinth | "Pan’s Labyrinth is one of the boldest films of recent years, and its bravery has certainly paid off. Director Guillermo del Toro has followed the trend of other contemporary Latin American directors such as Alejandro González Iñárritu, Alfonso Cuarón, and Fernando Meirelles, who together have secured a popularity for their films unprecedented in so-called ‘world’ or ‘foreign language’ cinema..." Read this article
Published on Fri Jan 19 15:34:01 2007 |  | |
| Children of Men | "Children of Men feels like a Casablanca (1942) for our time, conveying similar ideas of isolationism being overcome for a greater good. What also encourages the comparison is this film’s ability to seemingly effortlessly work these kinds of ideas into such an airtight and hugely enjoyable genre-film framework..." Read this article
Published on Sat Dec 9 19:37:09 2006 |  | |
| Casino Royale | "It is pointless to try to compare Casino Royale with the previous twenty instalments of the James Bond franchise, since it is as both as similar and as different as any of the other films are to one another. Other than what has been done with Daniel Craig as Bond, and a more talky script, it really is business as usual..." Read this article
Published on Sun Dec 3 09:40:19 2006 |  | |
| The Science of Sleep | "For all its witty postmodern flourishes, Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep is an almost extraordinarily old-fashioned romantic comedy, albeit one that - precisely because it explores feelings so basic and readily recognizable - is hard to discredit and even harder to dislike..." Read this article
Published on Mon Oct 30 11:25:25 2006 |  | |
| The History Boys | "For me - and I did see the original play - the film is a refreshingly re-worked version, comparably compelling and involving, and now crucially available to a much wider audience than could have seen it on stage. It is emphatically not a great movie, but it also doesn’t have to be a great movie..." Read this article
Published on Sat Oct 21 19:14:37 2006 |  | |
| The Departed | "Could Leonardo DiCaprio be the new Robert De Niro? Three films in swift succession with Scorsese may seem to point in that direction, at least in the eyes of the director himself. DiCaprio, a talented and still underrated actor who picks his roles carefully, has only made four films in the last five years, and - with one exception - they have all had Scorsese at the helm..." Read this article
Published on Mon Oct 16 00:42:22 2006 |  | |
| Clerks 2 | "Kevin Smith, as I alluded to in my short review, is the most frustrating of directors. An all-American auteur who writes, produces, edits, directs and even acts in his films, he is a hugely talented writer who occasionally throws up a gem of a movie but more commonly creates intriguing projects that finally disappoint..." Read this article
Published on Fri Oct 6 12:16:24 2006 |  | |
| Volver | "As critics have been quick to note, Volver (meaning to return or to go back) is a return for Almodóvar in many senses. It is, first and foremost, a personal return. It is a return to the bleak, arid, wind-torn plains of La Mancha, where Pedro spent the first eight years of his life..." Read this article
Published on Mon Sep 25 17:11:12 2006 |  | |
| The Wicker Man | "Neil LaBute's future in film doesn't look very good. In interviews for The Wicker Man he has already expressed interest in doing a sequel. His desire to move forward with lackluster projects should be alarming. The pedigree Neil LaBute had in order to get to this point should suggest a different filmmaker and an entirely different attitude toward the material he deals with... " Read this article
Published on Tue Sep 19 17:23:00 2006 |  | |
| A Scanner Darkly | "This Alternate Take will explore some of the many meanings this film's form conveys in relation to the subject it is depicting. This deserves noting because, though it is certainly not perfect in all respects, on this level A Scanner Darkly is - frankly - stunningly good..." Read this article
Published on Mon Sep 18 10:10:33 2006 |  | |
| Crank | "In my initial review of Crank, I criticised its failure to establish a “stable tone”. I want to expand on this remark here, and suggest an example of a scene that - despite probably being the film's most memorable sequence - does not settle well within the work as a whole, therefore illustrating one of my main criticisms..." Read this article
Published on Tue Sep 12 16:57:10 2006 |  | |
| The Notorious Bettie Page | "Knowing who the author of a work of art is can have some unfortunate consequences... The Notorious Bettie Page has been criticised by some for not judging the world of pornography its central character inhabits more harshly. Why would people expect or hope for this? Because its director, Mary Harron, is a woman..." Read this article
Published on Tue Aug 22 17:04:48 2006 |  | |
| World Trade Center | "Unlike any Oliver Stone film before, World Trade Center has an inkling of melodrama.... Because the portraits extend only to the hours after the attack, the depth of the emotions are limited, since the characters are only dealing with the shock and numb of the event. They then become sentimentalized because they deal with our most intrinsic fears and worries..." Read this article
Published on Mon Aug 21 17:11:16 2006 |  | |
| Superman Returns | "Superman Returns, as I state in my short review, is an acceptable film, but is never much more than that. Compared with Singer's work on the X Men films, and last year's triumphant reintroduction of DC comics' other famous superhero in Batman Begins (2005), it seems fair to say that this Superman is very much a let-down..." Read this article
Published on Tue Aug 8 16:56:32 2006 |  | |
| Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest | "How do you successfully follow up a successful surprise? As I said in my short review, Dead Man's Chest simply does not. Rather bloated and patchy, but still highly enjoyable, the film is a solid sequel, but not a patch on the real thing..." Read this article
Published on Thu Jul 13 19:01:26 2006 |  | |
| Hard Candy | 'The whole fun of this type of film essentially comes from the transgressive thrill you get from watching something so seemingly amoral - how well can this sit with the kind of moral investigation Hard Candy is apparently aiming for?' Read this article
Published on Sat Jul 1 15:31:39 2006 |  | |
| The Da Vinci Code | "The crucial difference between being acceptably (predictably) crappy and being Da Vinci Code-bad is that the latter's badness actually gets significantly in the way of watching the film - something that certainly doesn't happen in something averagely crap like, say, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen..." Read this article
Published on Fri Jun 9 15:31:39 2006 |  | |
| X-Men: The Last Stand | "It is fair to say that X Men: The Last Stand is something of a disappointment. This is true whichever way you look at the film: as a summer ‘event’ movie, it just doesn’t get the blood pumping; it is, compared to recent superhero/comic book adaptations, well below par; it is also a damp squib of a conclusion for what could have been a wonderful trilogy..." Read this article
Published on Thu Jun 8 12:36:02 2006 |  | |
| The Devil and Daniel Johnston | "There is a fascinating and troubling gap at the centre of experiencing and considering any work by Daniel Johnston: the man himself. With the current rebirth of his popularity, and particularly in the light of this documentary, it truly feels as if we are to consider him now - to all intents and purposes - dead..." Read this article
Published on Sun May 14 15:37:53 2006 |  | |
| The Squid and the Whale | "'Interesting' is the highest compliment The Squid and the Whale's family patriarch, Bernard (Daniels), can give something. His constant overuse of this one non-commital, cold, academic word for everything made me feel a pang of shame since it is also one of the first adjectives I myself jump to to describe a work of art I admire..." Read this article
Published on Fri Apr 28 09:07:23 2006 |  | |
| V For Vendetta | "Hollywood has always loved an underdog story; nothing is better than the little guy triumphing over impossible odds. Perhaps because of the Nazis in World War II, and a Cold War ideology, this idea has been applied rather inappropriately to military action in cinema and has now become something of the prevalent culture..." Read this article
Published on Tue Apr 11 07:18:44 2006 |  | |
| Manderlay | "If pressed to name a couple of things that make Von Trier’s films good, one thing that doesn’t immediately spring to mind is the one thing he has recently become most famous for: his ‘social commentary’..." Read this article
Published on Wed Apr 5 23:24:48 2006 |  | |
| Syriana | "I have to confess I had an ulterior motive for going to see Syriana: George Clooney’s highly impressive beard and healthy weight gain. As a rotund gentleman myself (a less troubling way of saying “fat bastard”) I have often felt that cinema is lagging behind television in its validation of overweight leading men..." Read this article
Published on Mon Apr 3 23:09:35 2006 |  | |
| Munich | "Spielberg has set himself an awesome challenge. On the one hand, this is a Mission Impossible-type thriller, with the audience rooting for the good guys as they seek to eliminate the evil progenitors behind a dastardly attack on innocent athletes. On the other, it is a study of the psychological damage that revenge can wreak on the minds and spirits of those pursuing it..." Read this article
Published on Tue Mar 14 12:29:24 2006 |  | |
| Good Night, and Good Luck. | "Perhaps unusually for Hollywood fare, it is pleasing to note that we can’t fully understand Good Night and Good Luck without being aware of the historical and social context of the events it depicts..." Read this article
Published on Thu Mar 9 08:41:01 2006 |  | |
| Caché (Hidden) | "In my short review I made reference to a violent scene in Caché that “comes so suddenly and mercilessly that it tempers everything that comes after it with a vicious sense of dread”. That moment was, of course, the suicide of Majid, the Algerian who Georges suspects is blackmailing him. The scene is so powerful that I would like to construct my whole Alternate Take - largely - around it..." Read this article
Published on Wed Mar 1 12:43:26 2006 |  | |
| The New World | "As some other critics have humbly noted, it is very difficult to know what to write critically about The New World. It is very very tempting, in fact, to not even try - to say merely “you just have to see it to understand it”. Yet I am never one to stay silent on things that I have felt strongly about - so here is my attempt..." Read this article
Published on Tue Feb 21 15:23:28 2006 |  | |
| Jarhead | "Jarhead has received much criticism, particularly in the US, for seeming to avoid the political implications of the Gulf War, and - by extension - those of its still-raging sequel...while it is certainly true that Jarhead is not a political tract, to maintain that it 'says nothing' is simply wrong..." Read this article
Published on Mon Jan 30 13:28:05 2006 |  | |
| 13 (Tzameti) | "The plight of Sébastien’s life has reached the point when the only conceivable method of quick-fix escape is to actually travel to Hell and try one’s luck..." Read this article
Published on Sun Jan 29 14:21:58 2006 |  | |
| Brokeback Mountain | "Everyone is rushing to call the wonderful Brokeback Mountain the first ‘gay Western’, but is it really a Western at all? I would, instead, like to stake a claim on it in the name of a recently overlooked genre: the romantic melodrama..." Read this article
Published on Tue Jan 17 17:03:35 2006 |  | |
| King Kong | "Remakes are a risky territory in cinema; for every Ocean’s 11 (2001) there is a Get Carter (2000). What these two specific examples also illustrate is that when the original is a pretty patchy movie in the first place things are made a whole lot easier than when someone turns their hand to a classic..." Read this article
Published on Tue Jan 3 16:02:55 2006 |  | |
| Kiss Kiss Bang Bang | "It is undeniable now that we are living in an age - whether you want to call it ‘postmodernism’ or not is up to you - in which acknowledging, recycling and deconstructing previous artistic styles is one of the main, if not now the dominant, form of artistic expression. Some find this self-awareness exciting and profound, others see it as emblematic of the decline of popular culture..." Read this article
Published on Tue Nov 29 21:48:56 2005 |  | |
| Thumbsucker | "In my short review I referred to Thumbsucker as a ‘Hollywood independent’ - seemingly an oxymoron if ever there was one. Yet it is a term that is now absolutely necessary to describe a particular type of American film..." Read this article
Published on Mon Nov 14 17:27:19 2005 |  | |
| Tim Burton's Corpse Bride | "Quite how Tim Burton became the major Hollywood director he is is still rather baffling to me. This isn’t just because his dense, hermetic, obsessive worlds are darker than those one usually expects to find in the Dream Factory’s output, but also because he has never really been that good a storyteller..." Read this article
Published on Tue Nov 8 13:03:00 2005 |  | |
| Innocence | "Innocence is a theme that I could write about for days. For one thing, it has inspired some of my very favourite artists: William Blake, Lewis Carroll, J.D Salinger, Joseph Cornell, and more recently, in film, Lars Von Trier and Paul Thomas Anderson - all have, one level or another, engaged with notions of innocence..." Read this article
Published on Thu Oct 27 14:44:54 2005 |  | |
| A History of Violence | "Rather bizarrely and embarrassingly, it didn’t occur to me that ‘A History of Violence’ was a title that had a potentially mundane, as well as grand, meaning (i.e: 'this character has a history of violence', as well as 'this is A History Of Violence'), until I had left the cinema..." Read this article
Published on Mon Oct 3 23:58:24 2005 |  | |
| Charlie and the Chocolate Factory | "There is rarely much pleasure to be had in ruthlessly criticising a film designed for children - the whole process often feels akin to stamping on a handmade toy. The sacred nature of children and our innate desire to protect them are two factors which can easily override our standard habits of judgment..." Read this article
Published on Sat Sep 10 02:06:16 2005 |  | |
| Broken Flowers | "In this time when many small, character-driven, ‘quirky’ Hollywood films are released each year to the sound of happy critics’ pens scribbling away, it seems a good time to take stock of Jarmusch, the man who more or less started the trend..." Read this article
Published on Thu Sep 1 14:35:12 2005 |  | |
| The Island | "Science Fiction, in both literature and cinema, has long sought to portray what the future will hold. Most of these futures are either utopian worlds where everything appears to be perfect or dystopias in which human society has degenerated into a more dangerous, uncivilised place..." Read this article
Published on Sat Aug 20 19:45:18 2005 |  | |
| One Missed Call | "What makes a good horror film? To my mind, it all comes down to uncertainty: we fear things because we don’t understand them, we don’t understand them because they are unknowable, they are unknowable because they do not conform to the self-imposed rules and explanations that we place on our own field of experience..." Read this article
Published on Sat Aug 13 17:23:12 2005 |  | |
| Silver City | "Hollywood as an industry likes to consider itself, if not definitively Left-wing, then at least liberal. It has a long tradition of rewarding self-congratulatory ‘social problem films’ at the Oscars, and its output has often been used for shooting-practice by the ‘Moral Majority’ to win election points..." Read this article
Published on Sun Aug 7 21:40:44 2005 |  | |
| War of the Worlds | "In interviews, Spielberg has been clear as to why he has made War of the Worlds now: to reflect directly fears of terrorism in since 9/11..." Read this article
Published on Mon Jul 25 15:18:03 2005 |  | |
| Mr. & Mrs. Smith | "As well as being a straightforwardly fun action-comedy, Mr. & Mrs. Smith also offers a refreshing vision of gender relations and marriage in the adventure film, a genre not famous for images of empowered women..." Read this article
Published on Wed Jul 20 23:52:46 2005 |  | |
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