This musical fantasy evokes a range of influences—The Wizard of Oz, Spirited Away, Edward Gorey, the Fleischer Bros.—while sustaining a glissando across a whole spectrum of emotions, from goofy to wistful to heartbroken and back again. It's a world of its own, sparkling new but faintly familiar. (Here's Christopher Lloyd, and there's Tim Curry: the cartoon antagonists of decades past.) Jokes and myths, which I suspect may be interchangeable, accumulate into a compact edifice that you can ascend and gaze down from, at which point you may as well clamber back down and watch all ten episodes again.
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Princess Warrior 1989
This starts out as a sloppy, sluggish attempt to fuse Star Wars with The Terminator, then develops into a nocturnal tour of whichever Los Angeles dives and warehouses would let this production use them as shooting locations. An evil space princess chases her innocent sister across the city—it's a little like a no-budget sci-fi King Lear—crossing paths with a hapless bartender and a pair of bumbling cops. Every showdown is interminable and tension-free. Eventually good triumphs over evil. The villains spend the whole movie clad in stylish workout clothes; I wonder if I could track those down on Amazon.
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How Do You Know 2010
I love to hear strong dialogue delivered well. I like to watch actors collaborate with their screenwriter—here, that's James L. Brooks, who also directed—by investing their line readings with a zeal for the language. "Jesus!" cries Reese Witherspoon during a bad first date. "Do you know I don't know you?" She unwinds that sentence, lets us savor its palindromic rhythm, lets it bump up against the rest of the conversation. She embraces every word that's been written for her.
The…
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The Safety of Objects 2001
I recently read the short story collection this is based on, and though I didn't really enjoy it, I still cringe seeing it mangled this heinously in adaptation. Rose Troche, working with author A.M. Homes, condensed seven of the book's ten vignettes into an unwieldy agglomeration. They conflated characters; interlaced every strand available for interlacing; and in the process, smothered all the best ideas and emotions in Homes' prose.
The haunting first-person monologue "Esther in the Night" turns into a…
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Tales from the Darkside: The Movie 1990
A mummy slashes Julianne Moore open and stuffs her with chrysanthemums; a cat wriggles down a hit man's gullet; Rae Dawn Chong sprouts wings and claws, then mauls her husband. These are Tales from the Darkside's showstoppers—its chief draws for a horror aficionado—and they're ghoulishly imaginative. The movie around them, however, coasts along on shoddy storytelling and perfunctory twist endings. The last segment in particular ("Lover's Vow") feels like half of an overused idea, only barely fleshed out. I'm just grateful this is an anthology so even the worst of it takes less than half an hour.
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Wings 1927
This whole world is violence—sweeping, bloody, loop-de-looping violence erupting into hand-painted orange flames. Within this world is love, a deep and tender love between two men, camouflaged behind surface heterosexuality and soldierly braggadocio. Beautiful violence, death-haunted love: only once the war is over will we have time for anything else.
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The Tenth Symphony 1918
In this juicy melodrama, a woman's one-time abuser barges back into her life with the intention of blackmailing her and marrying her stepdaughter. Encountering him in plush parlors and courtyards, she tries to maneuver him back out while keeping her new family together. Abel Gance tells her story using all my favorite staples of silent cinema: abundant irises; dissolves that connote memory's intrusion on the present; and inserts of expository letters that act like handwritten title cards. Although it lacks…
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Zootopia 2016
The comedy here benefits from scrupulous attention to detail. It accumulates into a functioning animal metropolis, built from bottom to top out of animal puns and gags playing on how each species experiences the world. A larcenous weasel, fleeing down a miniature street, trips over mouse-scaled cars. A sloth laughs at and then shares a corny joke, his languid speech broken up by agonizing pauses. The character designs are a relief after the Nordic mannequins of Frozen: some towering, some…
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Letter Never Sent 1960
Earth, water, wind, and flame: these elements pervade one berserk tracking shot after another, ushering four doomed geologists along a straitened woodland path. Dirt, rain, mist, and smoke: nature is alive, so this movie explodes with life, although arcing toward death. Soot, snow, clouds, and sun: this is the shimmering Fata Morgana landscape where the heroes live, where they'll try to stay alive, and where most of them are going to die. I'm also going to die, someday, but watching Mikhail Kalatozov movies helps me feel a little bit better about that.
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Ghoulies IV 1994
The Ghoulies saga comes full circle in this direct-to-video grand finale from the tireless Jim Wynorski. (His other 1994 credits? Director of the third Munchies movie and the third Body Chemistry movie. Co-director of Dinosaur Island.) Peter Liapis, star of the first movie, is back as a loose cannon LAPD detective hot on the trail of his evil ex-girlfriend. Those wacky demons are back as well, still cracking jokes like they did in the third movie, though now they've been…
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Senseless 1998
Most campus comedies never pay as much heed to the intertwining of class and race in college life as Senseless's first 10 minutes. Once its vaguely sci-fi premise kicks in, though, that thread gets tossed aside in favor of nonstop stale jokes about the go-getter hero's drug-enhanced senses. The surfeit of smell and taste that he perceives manifest onscreen via Marlon Wayans' twitchy nose and tortured mugging—over and over and over again. (Sometimes he's shot with a fisheye lens, hacky…
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Love & Friendship 2016
One more hyperverbal entry in Whit Stillman's too-slim filmography means one more monument of gratitude toward sunlight and the English tongue.
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