Animated
They Shot the Piano Player (2024)
Spanish director Fernando Truaba is one of those filmmakers whose filmography would be the envy of any amount of unsuccessful but still aspiring young directors struggling to make a name for themselves. His best-known work is 1992’s BELLE EPOQUE which brought him the Oscar for Best Foreign-Language Film. I admire that film a great deal, […]
DC League of Super-Pets (2022)
DC League of Super-Pets gets by on a lot of cuteness. It is adorable, and funny in a laid-back sort of way that puts a smile on your face. And, y’know, given the morbid tone of its concurrent DC output, they could use it. I just reviewed Black Adam a few days ago and found to […]
Mad God (2022)
I don’t know what to do here. I just spent an hour and twenty-three minutes beholding Phil Tippett’s Mad God, an ugly, unpleasant dystopian nightmare from which I exit the other side feeling unclean and confused. However, given it’s pedigree, particularly the fact that Tippett – The Oscar-winning special effects wizard who worked on everything […]
The Bob’s Burgers Movie (2022)
The most surprising thing about The Bob’s Burgers Movie is that it doesn’t feel like epic. Previous attempts to raise a prime time animated property onto the big screen, The Simpsons Movie and South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, have successfully ballooned up their world and their population of characters to fit the format. Those films […]
Around the World in 80 Days (2022)
I hated this movie. I really did. I know full-well that it was not made for my 50 year-old brain but I think that a child would be bored by it. It does no service to the story from which it gets its name. Give your kids the book instead, you’ll be doing them a […]
A Study in Disney: ‘Chicken Little’ (2005)
Disney is as much a part of our lives as love and death. It’s wrapped around us, and not just in our childhood. There are thousands and thousands of Disney movies by this point but the one that really shape the company and the culture are the animated features. Disney busted out of the gate […]
A Study in Disney: ‘Brother Bear’ (2003)
Brother Bear may be the most beautifully made animated film to ever flounder under the weight of a badly written story. Here is a movie with a glorious visual style backed by narrative choices that feel unresolved, as if the film went into final edits with the writers still undecided on what they wanted the […]