The one thing you can say about WICKED: FOR GOOD without fear of contradiction is that there is a lot of it. Not just the running time, which feels like so much more than 138 minutes, but in the Rococo exuberance of the production design. So much production design. It goes beyond mere attention to… Read More »
WICKED
There is nothing quite so thrilling as a revisionist theory of a well-known story when it works, and no better example of that than WICKED. First a book, then a theatrical musical, it has now made its way to the silver screen giving us The Wizard of Oz from the point of view of the… Read More »
PINOCCHIO
Just because you >can< render an animated classic into a live-action CGI extravaganza doesn’t mean that you should. Case in point, PINOCCHIO. It’s not an awful film but bringing the animated characters into the real world doesn’t add anything to the story of a little wooden puppet who dreams of being a real boy. Rather,… Read More »
CHAOS WALKING
CHAOS WALKING is a somber affair told in muddy earth tones and moribund action. Based on the book The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness, it presents New World in the year 2257, a distant planet colonized by religious humans who have brought with them much of what they should have left back… Read More »
HARRIET
HARRIET achieves the proper, and richly deserved, tone of reverence for its subject, Harriet Tubman. That is, alas, its greatest failing. The astonishing life of one of the most courageous Americans who has ever lived is told in a series of set pieces, vignettes with all drama sapped from them as they take on the… Read More »
BAD TIMES AT THE EL ROYALE
Drew Goddard crafts tales that are multi-layered and philosophically challenging. From his days in the Whedon-verse to the deliciously exercise in meta-text, CABIN IN THE WOODS, there is always much more going on than the surface narrative. And so it is with BAD TIMES AT THE EL ROYALE, which may not be the flawless wonder… Read More »