“In my hatred for the Bond franchise, I feel I may have done a disservice to its star. I have always had a tendency to discount Sean Connery as an exquisitely sculpted statue, capable of filling out a tuxedo very nicely but little else.”
“‘Underground’ remains a controversial and wildly ambitious film, one that refuses to be pinned down. It’s a never-ending hall of mirrors that reveals more about the audience than the narrative itself.”
“In the end, there can be no simple feelings of joy or satisfaction in seeing Batman defeat the Penguin — in seeing the good guy defeat the bad guy — because who’s the winner here, really?”
“Not quite comedies, not entirely horror movies and not normal family films, Dante’s work continues to impress with the layers each work reveals over time, a key factor in their lasting power.”
“Great art has every piece in intimate communion with the art as a whole. ‘Gretel & Hansel’ takes an elemental approach to the folklore, gasping with the fears of the original material while exhaling a new mystique of its own.”
“Ferrara throws everything at ‘Siberia,’ turning it into a playground for emotive relation. But it is Dafoe, his muse, who so thoroughly brings the audience along with the randomness…”
“At its seemingly lugubrious heart, ‘Return to Oz’ is an ode to imagination; a celebration of the weird and wonderful worlds of our own making, in which we find sanctuary and satisfaction.”
“The persona, the artist, the maestro, the ringmaster — one can’t help but bask in the direct, subjective joy and the elegiac reverence for cinema itself.”
“The Houses in Motion strand breaks the mould in successfully exploring how concepts of life and death, home and away and physical and mental states metamorphose and develop within their own spaces.”
“With ‘Daniel Isn’t Real,’ Mortimer stands by his choices and doesn’t wobble. The result is a film that’s harmonious and undiluted, if prickly and divisive.”
“‘It Chapter Two’ ends up as a self-conscious adolescent that nervously giggles any time it’s on the verge of doing something profound; a cringe-inducing ‘no homo’ walk-back writ large to avoid accusations of nastiness or tenderness.”