Movie 666

Honky tonk sexpot, redneck avenger, and king of cheese, Patrick Swayze will be missed

So-called action movie wastes time tinkering with timebombs while Nazis run amok in the desert

Up is proving irresistible to audiences and critics alike. But what does Morris Pevensey, the Movie Critic Who Hates Everything, have to say…

Is this new movie a Klingon plot to make us forget about glories of Khan, Tribbles, and the Kirk-Spock duel on Vulcan?

Hollywood gives the jack boots a double polish for this old school nailbiter. Why?

Stupid teens killed by the cabinful… it’s the same old stuff in the new Friday the 13th movie

Listen up. The killer robots are on their way, and John Connor wants to get a few things straight…

Outdated fashions and strangely effete lead character compromise otherwise fine portrayal of rough and tumble San Fran politico.

Unleash the hounds of hell… new talking dog movie the perfect cure for America’s economic and military woes

Why is the new Bond so pissed off?

This Halloween don’t anger the children. Your life depends on it.

Colorful documentary about graffiti, skateboard, and punk rock artists shows value of creative community

When a Clive Barker horror movie can’t get a decent theatrical release, you know the genre is in trouble

Great big Mongol movie balances bloody battles with kinder, gentler side of Genghis Khan

Hilarious mockumentary about the making of a low-budget horror film hits target audience straight in the heart — with a well-oiled machete.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdon of the Crystal Skull is so unbelievably cheesy, wheezy and queasy that, on leaving the cinema, I felt like simultaneously chugging a bottle of Pepto Bismol and four double-espressos just to restore my body’s equilibrium.

Break out the machetes, the zombies are attacking Colorado!

Movies based on classic board games like Monopoly, Candy Land, and Battleship may be coming to bore you soon.

Brilliant Cloverfield uses giant monster genre to address politics of terror

Coen Brothers shoot apart the traditional crime thriller to show deadly scope of drug world and fate itself

A politically irreverent masterpiece from the larger-than-life filmmaker who literally beats his critics.

What makes a movie great and not just good? I asked myself that question after seeing this film. Because I was swept away if not exactly blown away.

Review of strange new movie by estranged American filmmaker (he lives in the Netherlands) Julian Scaff

With six films of Star Wars finally complete, the question arises: Does the Jar Jar Binks of Episode I give the Han Solo of Episode VI a run for his money?

Do movie-watching crowds in this time of unrelenting jingoism, military opportunism, and peer pressure patriotism really want to see a negative portrait of our men and women in uniform?

By Demon
“Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.”
- Noam Chomsky, Media Control
Athleticism and good health are hallmarks of meaningful human existence. Unfortunately, commercial society perverts both to secure profit and control. Therefore it should not be suprising when the Department of Fatherland Security comes out […]

By Demon

Cutting to the chase
Knifefighting in The Hunted

For better or for worse, there is a time when every SUV driving denizen of Hollywood feels obligated to actually drive his vehicle out of the city and into the mountains for which it was ostensibly made.
Perhaps one of these trips inspired […]

Nine episode anime expands on the concept of the original Matrix movie. The films are bound by the same vision of a post-apocalypse caused by human actions — a world in which only hackers and misfits living on the fringe can see the truth.

Bowling for Columbine is opinionated, rambling, rough edged, and carries a tasteless title. It is also quite remarkable. For in his own stream of consciousness and highly personalized way, documentarian Michael Moore has connected the dots of American hegemony in ways that social theorists with copious volumes cannot.

[…]

By Demon
We live in it, we breath it, we drink it, and we destroy it, but where is it cinema? It fair to say that movies dealing with the natural environment are rare in today’s theaters.
Movies, almost universally, deal with interpersonal relationships and the struggles of goal seeking humans. Rarely do these goals involve the […]

By Dr. Theodore Mangrove
I was recently perusing the movie trailers at http://www.apple.com/trailers/ when I came across a new sci-fi movie called The Core. The premise of this film is that the Earth’s core is going to stop spinning, thus removing the protective magnetic field around the planet and leaving us exposed to the […]

By T. Fotherington Hexagram
The CIA: All-powerful, all knowing Gestapo of the world. A lurking shadow fires a silent bullet in Zimbabwe - an Afghan dictator dies of mysterious causes - smoke rings blown from a cigarette in a Zurich café are noted and decrypted - and the CIA, the eyes of America sees all, […]

By Alicia Frobisher
So I went to the movies AGAIN last weekend. I know, you’re all like “Ally, what, like don’t you have cable or something?” Right, and two parents parked in front of it. I mean, my god, what with Daddy and his pay-per-view wrestling and Mom bein a major horndog an shizit for […]

The buzz on Star Wars has always been that it’s an homage to the old Flash Gordon/Buck Rogers movie serials, only better. The new series reverses this - it’s incoherently silly like the old serials, but flashier and duller. At least Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones isn’t as […]

Madonna flirts with the idea of making a radical political statement with her American Life video, but ultimately keeps it tame. Nevermind the sexy dominatrix suit.

A one-man conspiracy named Stanley Kubrick does not want you to see his first feature film, Fear and Desire. Here’s why…

There is a scene in Black Hawk Down - Ridley Scott’s cinematic rendering of the bloody 1993 street battle that took place between elite U.S. solidiers and Somalia street fighters and militia - where inexperienced yet capable Sergeant Eversman is given some philosophical advice from Sergeant Sanderson, a battle-seasoned […]

The ubiquitous Michael Caine:
Water

In 1985, a movie called Water hit the theaters for about a week and then was gone. Unfortunately, this was probably the best satire of American and European politics of that decade, and most people have probably never heard of it.
The movie is a comedy of errors set […]

This is not the essay I planned on writing this month. My original article was about the contemporary “crisis in film criticism.” But in light of September 11, what I originally called a “crisis” seems like, well, not that big of a deal anymore, especially now that bombs are dropping overseas and the terrorist scare […]

Robots learn their place in
AI’s Flesh Fair

There are sections of A.I. Artificial Intelligence when director Steven Spielberg seems to be working hard to transcend the commercial imperatives of his earlier work and create a serious film with a new level of sophistication. Some of these sections are quite indebted to Stanley Kubrick, who spent […]

Mars needs trees:
Red Planet

Every year there are a pair of science fiction movies on the same subject heading. In the year 2000, the subject was a journey to the planet Mars. The first film, Mission to Mars, was so embarrassingly bad that it is not even worth writing […]

I lost money on this film. I bet four dollars against someone’s back issue of Teen Beat that it was going to flop. How did Peter Jackson do it?

By Demon

Film buzz Hollywood types line up around the block at the Hollywood Cineramadome, eager as Romans to see the Gladiator spectacle unfold. The cheers of the cinema audience mirror the cheers of the screen audience watching the bloody fights. Maximus wields two swords, separating head from body to furied spectator approval (suburbanites rejoice […]

Hollywood has embraced digital technology and the signs of the “new cinema” are everywhere — from special effects in theatrical films to streaming trailers on the web. Much more is promised: soon all movies will be shot on digital video and theaters will swap film projectors for digital ones. Film itself will vanish for […]

Princess Mononoke finally arrived in the United States with the promise that her ink and paint action and epic-length story would transcend not only your average animated movie, but your average live action feature. This coupled with progressive notions of man and nature, Mononoke is not your average toon.
Furthermore, the Princess is […]

Although Crash does not moralize about the environmental effects of the automobile so much as examine the depth of the automobile’s social penetration, the movie can still be looked at as an indictment of car culture.
Crash implies a dull acceptance on the part of culture regarding the destructive nature of the automobile. In Crash, […]

Usually the victims in horror movies fight back against their attackers, but this is not the case in the Blair Witch Project where the victims are overwhelmed by nature itself

EPISODE I: BEN KENOBI BLEACHES HIS BEARD
Some time late in 1998 I read that George Lucas was once again going to make Star Wars movies. These movies would step back in time from the original series and cover the early adventures of its greying heroes, folks like Ben Kenobi and Darth Vader. (article continues […]

Spielberg needs to separate filmic fantasy from physical reality and place his Dreamworks studio in an area that could benefit from a large commercial development instead of endangered wetlands.

Stanley Kubrick died in his sleep early last month. His death as a filmmaker comes at a time when filmaking itself is dying at the hands of digital technology.