After 70 years and 37 movies it's still possible to teach an old monster new tricks. Unlike the prior, contemporary Japanese entry SHIN GODZILLA (16) this is retro, more like GODZILLA MINUS SEVEN in that it takes place in 1947, seven years before the Big G rumbled onto screens. Tokyo is still an impoverished wreck after the war, and along comes Godzilla to mess things up further. With the national and world governments no help in the sensitive and suspicious…
Favorite films
Recent activity
AllPinned reviews
More-
-
Eileen 2023
It's a Christmas movie...but hardly a Hallmark one. For Thomasin McKenzie it's sort of like LAST NIGHT IN MA (though shot around Metuchen, NJ) as her drab routine as a prison secretary in 1964 is upended by the arrival of Anne Hathaway's Hitchcock blonde of a counselor. McKenzie's repressed character, tormented by her alcoholic ex-cop dad (Shea Whigham, in the "Shea Whigham" part) is excited by Hathaway's brazen behavior, but that may mask ulterior motives. From the director of LADY…
Recent reviews
More-
Napoleon 2023
In an interview Ridley Scott chided his Apple Original Films "colleague" Martin Scorsese for letting four years pass between THE IRISHMAN and KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON, during which time he made three movies (with another big one, a second GLADIATOR, coming next year). While not overly enamored of KILLERS myself (for one thing both it and Scott's latest suffer from arthritic casting in the lead roles) it shows care and thoughtfulness in the telling--this is just a choppily executed…
-
The Exorcist: Believer 2023
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled…was getting someone to cough up $400 million for the rights to a property that no one has cared about in 50 years.
Popular reviews
More-
Saint Jack 1979
A cable favorite in my teens, finally available in a good quality DVD, anamorphically enhanced at last. (Why no Blu-ray?) Its frank, febrile atmosphere is one of those things that got me to Asia, though Singapore was a disappointingly authoritarian place by the time I got there. There's nothing disappointing about the film, though, Bogdanovich's return to movies after a string of flops, a Paul Theroux adaptation made with a dummy script to fool the authorities into thinking it was…
-
Sands of the Kalahari 1965
Endfield's followup to the hit ZULU isn't the baboon horror movie I'd always thought; they're there, but until the coda mostly in the background, observing plane crash survivors go ape over the female (Susannah York) in their party and their dwindling prospects. The sexual politics are 1965, but all credit due the film for detailing them, as York passes from the loutish pilot (Nigel Davenport) to the brutish alpha male (Stuart Whitman) to an injured, initially diffident fellow passenger (Stanley…
