The 16th Annual Online Film Critics Awards
Folks, the Online Film Critics Society has given out its annual awards, and the organisation's members have given a special prize, one of three, to the For The Love Of Film Blogathon, comprising...
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Les Misérables (2012)
The movie musical, like the western, is a film genre whose heyday seems long past. And yet it is sustained through occasional revivals, by rusted-on aficionados who constantly and fervently pray for...
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Ice Palace (1960)
Memories of would-be blockbusters and failed Oscar-bait past. Based on a late novel by the titan of pulpy epics, Edna Ferber, Ice Palace wanted to be compared to the previous big screen Ferber...
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Gangster Squad (2013)
My first viewing of a proper 2013 release, and not an auspicious start. Gangster Squad has been the target of reviews that ranged from the middling to the lacerating, but some have tried to make a case...
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Miss Jean Brodie’s Modestly Magnificent, Matriarchally Manipulative...
My attempts to share in those carnivals of cinephilia that are Dennis Cozzalio’s epic movie quizzes in the past have been stymied by my tendency to over-think answers and his cunning capacity to...
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Hercules vs. Moloch (Ercole contra Molock, 1963)
An eruption of popularity sparked by Pietro Francisi’s Hercules (1959), starring Steve Reeves, helped make the Italian peplum or sword-and-sandal movie into an internationally successful genre, with an...
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Cromwell (1970)
The late 1960s and very early 1970s saw a last bloom of a short-lived genre, that of the serious historical epic, with films that tried to combine the traditional wealth of pageantry and expansive...
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Secret of the Incas (1954)
Jerry Hopper’s Secret of the Incas is today best known, if at all, as one of the progenitors of Raiders of the Lost Ark(1981). It was shown on the set of the later film to the cast and crew by...
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Dredd (2012)
The old ultra-violence with colours that viddy right well on the screen, in a world that would make Alex and his Droogies weep for joy. Dredd takes up the coolly wanton, blackly satiric comic book by...
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Iron Man Three (2013)
Here there be spoilersThe wave of action cinema Hollywood produced in the 1980s and early ‘90s finally retreated thanks to the convergence of decadently self-mocking flops like Hudson Hawk (1991) and...
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Beautiful Creatures (2013)
Witches could be the next big thing: Beautiful Creatures follows editions of the necromantic evil Queen in Snow White and The Huntsman and Mirror Mirror (both 2012), the eponymous prey of Hansel and...
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The Voyage (Il Viaggio, 1974)
Vittorio De Sica’s final film as director is a peculiarly diffident affair. De Sica, best known to popular audiences as a comedic star akin to an Italian Cary Grant, had of course surprisingly...
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The Lone Ranger (2013)
Like Superman, who’s also had a mega-budget revisiting this year, the Lone Ranger speaks to a part of the psyche in everyone that is still a kid in front of the television, in a magical land where it’s...
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Rock All Night (1957)
Rock All Night seems at first to be one of those early rocksploitation films, a la Rock Around the Clock (1956) and Don’t Knock the Rock (1957), whose sole purpose was to showcase a sizeable slice of...
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Only God Forgives (2013)
Nicolas Winding Refn’s latest was reportedly met with jeers and walkouts at the Cannes Film Festival, and the critical enmity largely followed it to general release, a sad fate for a film that was...
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Byzantium (2012)
A vampire film directed by Neil Jordan, starring British wonder girls Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan, might have been the stuff of box office dreams, but instead the Irish master’s latest has sunk...
View ArticleThe Art of the Self-Mocking Film Trailer
Movie trailers today, whether the ones playing to multiplex crowds or the slightly gorier redband variations we're looking up online, are generally infamous for two things: saying too much, and being,...
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A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III (2013)
Roman Coppola, son of Francis, brother to Sofia, is the popularly ignored scion who made the terrific but scarcely-seen CQ (2001). He gained some kudos recently when he co-wrote the bittersweet...
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Word War Z (2013)
Perhaps the most expensive remake of Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2010) anyone could ask for, Marc Forster’s big-budget zombie flick had a troubled production, but overcame it to be a major box office...
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Rush (2013)
Ron Howard was, in the ‘80s and ‘90s, a reliable director for slick, entertaining, broadly styled, forgivably shallow fare that pretty much defined mainstream Hollywood cinema on a median grade,...
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