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Pick Up the Pieces: Leonardo DiCaprio is The Revenant
Alejandro González Iñarritu is the most versatile director of our time. After the highly complex Birdman, which reflects on media and show business in a self-referential way, he surprises the public with a movie which couldn’t be baser. It reminds me of the famous quote by Auguste Rodin, ‘I choose a block of marble and […]
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A New Chapter: J.J. Abrams Introduces the Next Generation to Star Wars: The Force Awakens
‘Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away…’ Every part of the Star Wars franchise begins with that fairy tale opening and John Williams’s trademark fanfare, and each time, the diehard fans have been passionate about it. A decade after George Lucas’s final film in the series, the latest installment, Episode VII: The […]
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Fight the Good Fight: Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies, or the End of an Era
Although fans and critics alike haven’t been completely satisfied with the results, the first two parts of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy have been among the biggest-grossing movies in recent years. One of the chief criticisms about the film series has always been that the director made a 300-page children’s book by J.R.R. Tolkien stretch […]
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Shock the Monkey: Matt Reeves Brings Us the Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes
French novelist Pierre Boulle’s alternative universe in which apes rule the planet has long fascinated Hollywood. It spawned five movies between 1968 and 1974, a TV series, plus a remake in the early 2000s. Those releases have been a mixed bag. The original Planet Of The Apes starring Charlton Heston is universally considered a classic, […]
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Journey Into Space: Reawakening the Giant in J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek: Into Darkness
In 2009, the Star Trek reboot by J.J. Abrams clearly divided the devout ‘trekkies.’ The picture shed a different light on several beloved characters from the original television and movie series – including a new version of Spock who actually showed some emotions and an older ego of the same Vulcan contributing to the creation […]
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Fun in Space: Robert Rodriguez’s Machete Kills Not Only in This World
There were times when Machete was but a bloodthirsty creature from one of the many fake trailers for the Grindhouse double-dip of Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof and Planet Terror by his old friend Robert Rodriguez. Yet a full-blown effort by fans eventually forced the hands of the two filmmaking buddies, and the character re-emerged as […]
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School’s Out: John Hughes’s Cool Way to Skip Classes in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
When John Hughes died of a heart attack at age 59 in 2009, the filmmaking world lost one of its true greats in the comedy realm. His biggest box-office smashes as a writer have been family movies in the 1990s, such as Home Alone and 101 Dalmatians. Earlier, however, John Hughes had already pulled off […]
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Man on a Mission: The Post-Apocalyptic Tom Cruise of Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion
There once was a time when science-fiction films were innovative and ahead of their time. Back then, even B-movies could attract audiences because they had something to say, despite their overall trashy appearance. Nowadays, it sometimes feels as if major studios seem to be more interested in shelling out large sums for rather pedestrian works […]
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Danger Zone: Science-Fiction and Metaphysics in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker
Apart from legendary Battleship Potemkin genius Sergei Eisenstein, Andrei Tarkovsky is arguably Russia’s most renowned movie director from the Soviet era. The son of famous poet Arseni Tarkovsky polarizes, however. Opinions on him are divided. Some can’t really get into his films and only consider them to be dead boring. Others regard these works as […]
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Children of the Revolution: Slapstick, Soviet-style in Leonid Gaidai’s Operation ‘Y’ & Shurik’s Other Adventures
Operation ‘Y’ And Shurik’s Other Adventures (1965) is one of the cult comedies from that time virtually every Russian knows. Other than having a fun time, what can we can learn about life in the Soviet Union of the 1960s from watching the film? Meet Shurik (Alexander Demyanenko), the nerdy, clumsy, good-natured, and oh so […]
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Misty Mountain Hop: Middle-earth Revisited in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Fans have been clamoring for it for almost a decade, through numerous delays, changes in the director’s chair, and alterations in the general concept. Pan’s Labyrinth mastermind Guillermo del Toro wanted to shoot it, but eventually The Lord Of The Rings veteran Peter Jackson gave in and decided to travel to J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantastic Middle-earth […]
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Falling into Infinity: The Bottom Line on the Indie Epic Cloud Atlas by Tom Tykwer and the Wachowskis
A big-budget independent movie based on a novel considered to be ‘unfilmable’ – that sounds like a recipe for disaster, doesn’t it? Three renowned directors still made the daring choice to tackle David Mitchell’s 2004 book Cloud Atlas. They hired an international all-star cast consisting of the likes of Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, […]