‘Ponyo’ is the latest animated creation from the Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, whom I consider one of the best directors of our time, having done ‘My Neighbor Totoro’ and recent Oscar-winner ‘Spirited Away’. He captivates the audience not with one-liners or explosions but with images, with his incredible hand-drawn animation.
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‘Ponyo’ is a variation of ‘The Little Mermaid’: [...]
‘(500) Days of Summer’ is a huge breath of fresh air in a genre more cliche-ridden than any other: the romantic comedy. It’s still a basic boy-meets-girl story but it’s in a class all its own. ‘500 Days of Summer’ is the story of Tom, who is looking for love and Summer, who doesn’t believe [...]
My, my, my. Before my lifetime, films were either based on novels or were original stories by screenwriters. Now it seems all films are based on toys, video-games, are sequels, or remakes of a Japanese horror movie. ‘G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra’ is much, much better than a certain other summer blockbuster based on a [...]
‘G-Force’ may go down in history as the film that made me realize that I need to bring a notebook to the movies, be it to jot down observations, help me remember certain parts, note certain actors…Or to list all the truly horrific lines of dialogue that a film can possibly have. ‘G-Force’ is about [...]
Harry Potter no longer lives in the light-headed, PG fluff fantasy world that he occupied in the early Potter films. As the very first shot of the film suggests simply by its color palette, this film is rather bleak. It centers on the raging hormones of the teenagers at the magical academy, but also builds [...]
Johnny Depp portrays infamous 1930s bank robber John Dillinger in ‘Public Enemies’. Director Michael Mann has made a career out of making stylish action epics with great shootouts and interesting characters. ‘Public Enemies’ is no doubt stylish, it no doubt has great shootouts, but the characters are a bit flat. There’s no real character [...]
‘Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs’ is by the far the best ‘Ice Age’ film so far. It’s the best because the animation is now on a whole new level, as photorealistic as it gets, only enhanced by the 3-D. It’s the best because its way more action-oriented, focusing on the more slapstick elements that [...]
‘My Sister’s Keeper’ is a movie as calculated and forced as its main character, a young girl genetically conceived to provide spare organs for her cancer stricken sister. It knows who will watch it: Teenage girls, their mothers, and women looking for a weepy film in the vein of ‘A Walk to Remember’ or ‘The [...]
Jack Black, Michael Cera, Paul Rudd and Harold Ramis are all extremely talented comedic actors, who just starred in the worst film of their career together. ‘Year One’ is awful on several levels, one being that its entire concept is stolen from other, better films. (’Life of Brian’, ‘History of the World Part I’) Another [...]
‘Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen’ is the dumbest movie in a long time. I never really understood when people complained about a film’s length, but ‘Transformers’ changed that. I never thought that there could be truly too much action in a summer movie, that explosions could numb one to the point of a headache. ‘Transformers’ [...]