My latest for The Playlist: Phantom Boy, Alain Gagnol & Jean-Loup Felicioli’s follow-up to the excellent A Cat in Paris. (FYI: If you haven’t seen that one, it’s on Netflix Instant.) Phantom Boy lets the duo continue indulging their love of noir to an extent, but mostly the movie is all about superheroes and comic book movies. It’s an … Continue reading →
…man, even thinking of an appropriate intro blurb for linking my review of The Secret Life of Pets feels like as much a chore as writing the review itself. What a nothing of a movie. It isn’t terrible. It isn’t good. It is awkward and oddly structured, and you can see where Chris Renaud and Yarrow … Continue reading →
…yeeeeeah, I don’t know what I can say about Eiichi Yamamoto’s Belladonna of Sadness that I don’t say better and with more clarity (such as it is) in my Paste Magazine review. No lead-in here. Just click the link. You won’t be disappointed. Or maybe you will be. Then again, I compare watching this movie to … Continue reading →
I don’t know how many people have access to movies like April and the Extraordinary World, and I don’t know many people love Hergé and Tintin and traditional animation and steampunk and Marion Cotillard. If you do love any one or more of those things, this movie was basically made with you in mind. It’s glorious. It’s also … Continue reading →
Months ago, if you told me Zootopia would win me over on a cardiovascular level, I probably would have ignored you. Yet here we are today, with my glowing review freshly posted over at Paste Magazine. Zootopia is a delight. Even if it didn’t lean hard on its discrimination allegory, it would still be wonderful; it has a great sense … Continue reading →
I’m cheating on the title here, and I know it, but: Only Yesterday, one of the earliest films by Studio Ghibli co-founder and all around genius Isao Takahata, has enjoyed neither a theatrical run nor a home video release here in North America since the film premiered twenty five years ago. (That, of course, doesn’t mean people … Continue reading →
Confession: I cried at the end of Kung Fu Panda 3. Do not take my response to the film’s emotional payload as a strict endorsement of the whole package; as third entries in movie franchises go, Kung Fu Panda 3 is a good bit of fun that falls victim to diminishing returns and an unpolished script. How many times must Po, … Continue reading →
“Last year, animation distributor GKIDS managed to score two nominations in the AMPAS’ Best Animated Feature Film category: Tom Moore’s Song of the Sea and Isao Takahata’s The Tale of Princess Kaguya. By contrast, their 2015 slate looks less prestigious, with two mixed bags in Extraordinary Tales andKahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, plus the good but … Continue reading →
“When Pixar first arrived with 1995’s Toy Story, they fell into a steady release routine and reliably output a movie every one to three years. 2006 began the eight-year streak in which the animation giant dropped a new title every summer, all the way up to 2013’s Monsters University, which came out amid peak Pixar … Continue reading →
“Extraordinary Tales, a seasonal piece of spookery by Raul Garcia, means well but haunts only half-heartedly. The film is a meta-monument to the works of Boston-born, Baltimore-dead Gothic-Romantic wunderkind Edgar Allan Poe, chiefly his short stories but with a side helping of poems: “Annabel Lee” and “A Dream Within a Dream” start us off alongside … Continue reading →
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