For nearly a decade, the film output of Pixar was primarily conceived from the minds of animators already working at the studio like John Lasseter (To…
The Film Canon
A series of articles and reviews of older movies that have entered, well, the film canon, for being creatively or culturally important. Everything from Citizen Kane to The Breakfast Club to Fargo to The Dark Knight. So we can all create a diverse list of essential movies for the young folk cinephiles to watch
Film Canon : The Heroic Ones [1970]
There are many Revisionist Westerns and there are many Revisionist chanbara, but there are very few, if any, Revisionist wuxia. While Western and Japa…
10 Years Later: Still No Country for Old Men
It’s been ten years since the release of what some might refer to as Joel and Ethan Coen’s masterpiece. Released in 2007 amidst numerous politically-m…
Dirty Dancing: 30 Years Later
“That was the summer of 1963” opens Dirty Dancing, a movie that set out to create a time capsule for the Kennedy administration and ended up inadverte…
The Film Canon: Spider-Man 2 (2004)
What a world of difference there is between the superhero blockbuster of today and the superhero blockbuster of 2004. What a vast, vast world of diffe…
The Film Canon: The Last Unicorn (1982)
Some movies just stay with you. Admittedly, I didn’t rewatch The Last Unicorn over and over as I did with more mainstream animated classics like…
The Film Canon: Bad Lieutenant
Bad Lieutenant, set in a particularly grimy-looking New York, lugs around enough Catholic-guilt, crooked cops, cocaine snorting and a somewhat-conscio…