Crimson Peak movie review: humorous gruesome
A deliciously creepy haunted-house story. Oozes eldritch atmosphere yet plays with our genre expectations in ways that make it as funny as it is scary.
1890s
Bel Ami (review)
Welcome to the costume-drama equivalent of Project X, celebrating misogyny and male sociopathy as just the way things are, and what else can ya expect from the world?
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (review)
Oh, glorious steampunk! Oh, glorious Victoriana! Oh, for a time when men were men (and not little boys) and industry meant hard work (and not corporate malfeasance) and optimism (and not despair) ruled the day. When the future was so bright, you hadda wear shades.
Doctor Who thing of the day: 1890s steampunk TARDIS
What if the Doctor had landed on Earth first not in the 1960s but in the 1890s? Might the TARDIS’s chameleon circuit gotten stuck on something like this?
The Prestige movie review: magical mystery tour
The Prestige is a fan-fuckin’-tastic popcorn flick that’s as smart as it is shifty, like some lost Alan Moore graphic novel come to life, like something Jules Verne would have written if he were Neil Gaiman.
Nikki, Wild Dog of the North movie review
This gorgeously shot 1961 Disney movie is half awwww-inspiring romp through evergreen forests, half near-documentary about the Darwinian horrors of the food chain disguised as a kiddie flick.
Gandhi (review)
Director Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi is one of the most ambitious biographical films ever made, encompassing not just more than half a century of one man’s life but also one country’s struggle for independence. Ben Kingsley is a marvel as Mohandas K. — later called Mahatma — Gandhi, doing a remarkable job of conveying the soft-spoken determination of a man who would come to inspire a messianic fervor among his people and convincingly aging himself 55 years with little more than alterations in his posture and way of carrying himself.
The Life of Emile Zola (review)
The Life of Emile Zola is a curiously uninvolving biopic — curious because the second half of the film operates at a distance from its professed subject, exchanging his for another man’s story.
The Great Ziegfeld (review)
Get past the set pieces that date the movie and make it twice as long as it might be, and The Great Ziegfeld — a biopic of theatrical impresario Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. — is a moving story of how the weaknesses and obsessions that ironically made one man a powerful entertainment mogul inevitably brought about his downfall.
Cimarron (review)
Wichita just ain’t far enough west for Yancey Cravat (Richard Dix). He longs for the untamed frontier. So when the 1889 Oklahoma land rush puts 2 million acres up for grabs, he packs up the wife, Sabra (Irene Dunne), and the kid, Cimarron (which means ‘wild,’ we’re told), and heads off to help build a new world, or, more specifically, the boomtown of Osage, Oklahoma.
