They Shot the Piano Player (2024)
Spanish director Fernando Truaba is one of those [...]
Kids
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
What a lovely film. What a joy. What a relief to see a Pinocchio film done right in 2022. Having my stomach still churning from Disney’s absurd live-action remake a few months ago, I must admit that I did not step into Guillermo del Toro’s new version with a lot of hope. This story has […]
Chip ‘n Dale’s Rescue Rangers (2022)
The tagline for Chip ‘n Dale’s Rescue Rangers proudly announces that “It’s not reboot, it’s a comeback.” Actually it’s a confusing morass of both, plus an update, a remake, a follow-up, a rehash, and a badly rendered nostalgic day-trip. I challenge anyone to nail down exactly what this movie is. My interpretation is that it is […]
Home Sweet Home Alone (2021)
Back, long ago, when I reviewed Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, I made the statement that Home Alone wasn’t exactly a series that you could build on. After five sequels of lesser value, that opinion still stands. It’s not like Star Wars or Batman where you have a universe to play in. The idea of a […]
The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part (2019)
Four years ago, Chris Miller and Phil Lord’s The LEGO Movie arrived in multiplexes with a response of candy-colored shock and awe. What might have been a soulless corporate shell of a movie (see: The Emoji Movie) turned out to be a brilliant bit of creative thinking that made nearly every other kid’s movie look like […]
Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse
Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse is no less than the seventh Spider-Man feature film to be released in this millennium and watching it you realize how many of those live-action films are basically carbon copies of each other. Spiderverse sets itself apart not just by being animated but by being a colorful 124-minute carnival of creative […]
Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018)
I have spent the better part of a year writing individual essays on every animated feature in Disney’s official cannon from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to Moana and the one thread that seems to flow through all of them is that they are timeless. Even if they employed themes of the moment, the […]
Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018)
When all was said and done, after all of the portents and secrets had been revealed and the overelaborate special effects employed for Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald had ceased, I sat back in my seat trying to figure out how to best describe this movie in one word. Wandering through the vast dictionary […]
Beauty and the Beast (2017)
Any remake of Beauty and the Beast is going to be a tough sell for someone like me. That 1991 classic so touch my heart and so shook my notions of what an animated feature could accomplish that any attempts to recapture its magic could only come off as an imitation. That, in essence, is […]
