loaded question: what’s the best movie ever about magic?
Define magic however you like: could be supernatural magic, stage magic, or any other definition of the word you can defend.
Lord of the Rings The Fellowship of the Ring
Journey 2: The Mysterious Island (review)
Crams three times the hoo-hah of the first film into a 3D CGI theme-park ride, yet reduces itself to one-third the fun…
question of the day: If you could retitle any blockbuster, what would you call it?
Sci Fi Wire ran a piece recently about “the secret code names of 37 sci-fi blockbuster films” — which sounds cooler than it actually is. I thought it would be about the original titles for great films that we now love, and hey, wouldn’t it be funny/silly/stupid if we couldn’t stop talking about that classic … more…
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (review)
The words I keep coming back to, the ones that seem to fit this most astonishing of films best, are ‘terrible’ and ‘awful.’ The old-fashioned senses of the words are what I’m talking about: Peter Jackson has given us a grandly eloquent film that inspires more terror and more awe than anything I’ve seen in a long time. I can compare my reaction to it only with the moviegoing experiences of my childhood, when the hugeness, the all-encompassing-ness of movies in all ways — emotionally, viscerally, visually, aurally — first astounded me, when ‘Night on Bald Mountain’ and Darth Vader’s stormtroopers horrified me to such a degree that I can still feel it.
top 11 movies of 2001: the great, the good, and the really, really ugly
Another year of really, really crappy movies was saved, in the end, by a Bohemian storm, a magical ring, a robot boy, and a lonely mademoiselle. A feeling of the otherworldly permeates every movie on my best-of list this year, even the one documentary. And the weird thing is that most of these films were … more…
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (review)
Other critics have already dragged out the $10 words to describe this film — some of the ones I’d chose myself are ‘seductive,’ ‘masterful,’ ‘majestic,’ and ‘elegant’ — and you must believe what they say because they say True Things. But the one thing that strikes me most about LOTR: FOTR, besides its seductively masterful and majestic elegance, is simply how utterly right it is.
