I’ve made no secret around these parts that I believe The Conjuring is one of the finest films of the last decade. It is a solid horror film that not only delivers the scares – it demonstrates a true understanding of the craft of filmmaking as a...
There are certain movie musical spectacles that just take your breath away. The ensemble pieces of Busby Berkeley. That opening prologue to West Side Story. The log dance in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Or the dance across the bleachers in...
Ed. Note: This past February, I had the opportunity to virtually attend the Sundance Film Festival. I watched a total of ten films over the course of three days. And while scheduling did not permit me to run them in February, I did have a chance...
A genre that really doesn’t exist in Hollywood anymore is the gonzo comedy. Sort of a go-for-broke approach, the gonzo comedy exists as a series of loosely-connected ideas where the filmmakers lean so far into the stupidity of the idea, often...
The Western genre is the story of America’s foundation, or at least the way we like to tell it. This has always been the case from the early days of Hollywood, when filmmakers like John Ford told tall tales of brave white pioneers traversing...
Every once in a while, there’s a film that begs the question: is an idea enough to carry a film? Because sometimes, a film’s core conceit and metaphor fall completely flat, but the execution is so entertaining, you’re willing to overlook it. Such...
I did not watch Godzilla vs. Kong for the plot. Who would? I watched it for three key reasons: one personal, one professional, and one animalistic. Personally, I am a huge Godzilla fan, from the intellectual predecessor Gojira to the fun sequels...
Every once in a while, a film debut hits you like a bullet. In the wake of the pandemic, the frequency of this sensation has vastly increased, as studios desperate for any amount of money are throwing a few thousand dollars at hungry first-timers...
Well, for better or worse, Zack Snyder’s Justice League is here. It’s been a hell of a journey: after one average and one outright bad entry into the superhero canon in 2013 and 2016, Zack Snyder found himself in an uphill battle to produce a...
One of my favorite movie lines of all time comes from the 2002 film Adaptation. After hearing his brother Charlie rip apart his clichéd, ridiculously predictable crime thriller screenplay about a detective hunting for a serial killer, the...
There’s a famous saying, reportedly from Josef Stalin, “The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.” In Kevin Macdonald’s The Mauritanian, this logic is used in an attempt to reverse-engineer sympathy, and to reignite...
I’m having a hard time exactly categorizing The Father. It is a masterful achievement, and yet a film I never necessarily want to watch again. It is a testament to great acting and editing while simultaneously feeling overbearingly staged. It is...
Ancora © 2016 All Rights Reserved Terms of Use and Privacy Policy
