The Lonely Island crew has a new project, a bizarre inside joke that has spawned a 30-minute Netflix special, awkwardly titled The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience, and given the designation of being “A Lonely Island Visual Poem.” Truly, the whole special is as absurd…
As well all know, 20th Century Fox has been purchased by Disney, and the X-Men are now under new management, presumably to be re-exploited and re-integrated into the larger whole at some point. After not merely 6 previous films (11 if you count the…
It’s fascinating to watch a movie come out and gross hundreds of millions of dollars, while also barely making a blip on the American pop culture radar. Obviously, other countries have been producing their own films for as long as the medium has existed,…
Where 2014’s Godzilla tried to take its cues from Ishiro Honda’s iconic 1954 introduction to the character, the new Godzilla: King of the Monsters skews a lot closer to Toho Studios’ more cartoonish, action-packed sequels that poured in during the 60’s and especially the 80’s.…
The Professor and the Madman arrives with an awful lot of baggage for such a modest, unassuming movie. As detailed by Nick Shager in a Daily Beast article, the film has been sitting on a shelf while Mel Gibson (whose company Icon Productions bought…
Amy Poehler‘s Wine Country barely qualifies as a movie – it’s essentially a vacation slideshow featuring a who’s who of industry funny women. Much like Alexander Payne’s Sideways but recast with middle-aged women, Wine Country finds a group of former co-workers out on a wine tour in the…
Chinese filmmaker Lou Ye’s The Shadow Play is a vicious work that descends into the depths of corruption in both a private enterprise (the events of the film are based on those of the real company named here) and in State government (the implications…
Lou Ye’s 2014 film Blind Massage marked a transition for director, one that took him into broadly more commercial territory for the first time. Based on the popular novel of the same name, the film unsurprisingly concerns the lives of a Nanjing-based community of…
Despite Lou Ye’s reputation for pushing the boundaries of Chinese censorship guidelines – due to his often frank and incisive takes on politics, gender, and sexuality – Mystery proves a confoundingly tame affair. It opens with the antics of privileged, hedonistic youths racing cars…
Love and Bruises, which Lou Ye made during his five-year, government-imposed ban from filmmaking in China, is a tale of l’amour fou set, appropriately enough, in Paris. However, the grand romanticism that usually marks such stories is replaced here by a grimly repetitive pattern…
