Movie Reviews
Titles starting with A
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
This is one of those movies, like The Age of Innocence and New York, New York, that Martin Scorcese did, far out of his normal comfort zone, just to show he could do it. There’s no mean streets here, no Mafia, no crazed taxi drivers. It’s a chick flick, pure and simple, and one of the best of that maligned genre.
Ellen Burstyn ... Read more »
Alice in Wonderland
I have an idea. Let’s remake The Wizard of Oz. Only, let’s have it kick ass this time! (Actually, what we’ll be making is a sequel, but there’s already a movie called Return to Oz, so let’s keep the title to confuse people.) Let’s turn the Tin Man into a Transformer who can shoot lasers out of his eyes and ... Read more »
Alice in Wonderland
A little gem like this film is, to me, worth ten of that overblown, dark, depressing warthog of a film by Tim Burton in 2010. SFX does not have to improve a movie. It’s even better than the Disney version, which I loved. This one, though it had a high budget for its time, is so much simpler and more true. It was a flop, and the consensus opinion is that few of the stars were recognizable ... Read more »
Alice’s Restaurant
The first time you hear it, it’s pretty funny. The second time you might chuckle here and there. By the third time you are mighty tired of hearing about those “twenty-seven 8 x 10 colored glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explainin’ what each one was.” By the fourth time, you’re sprinting across the room to change the radio station ... Read more »
Alien
On this site I have a list of my 25 favorite films of all time (plus two more that I added later). It’s agonizing to make a list like this—I started out to pick my Top Ten—because there are always so many films that ought to be on the list, but there’s just not room! However, if I expanded this list to the Top 50, or maybe even the Top 30, Alien would be on it. There ... Read more »
Alien: Covenant
I noted with considerable alarm that Ridley Scott, a director I once had a great deal of respect for, is contemplating no less than six more Alien films. That’s in addition to Alien, Aliens, Alien 3, Prometheus, and this one. At least one of them is a done deal: a sequel to this, which would make it a prequel ... Read more »
Alien Nation
What a promising idea, and what a mess. What if the first aliens we meet are interstellar Okies, sort of trash that nobody else wants (Morons From Outer Space handles the same basic idea comically) … and it is utterly destroyed by the sheer stupidity of the idea that they can’t stand contact with ... Read more »
Alien Trespass
The idea here is that this is a movie made in 1957 and lost for over 50 years. And that’s exactly what it looks like. Every detail is right, from the lovely, saturated Technicolor, to the deliberately bad back projection shots when people are driving around in cars. (It’s supposed to be happening in the Mojave ... Read more »
Alien vs. Predator
One of the worst movies we’ve ever seen. What a crapulous, brain-dead, festering hemorrhoid of a movie. If Hollywood had a great big pimple on its face, and you squeezed it, this is the movie that would come out. I’d hate to have to pay the Vaseline budget for this atrocity. Slime city!
Thirty or forty people (who’s counting? not even the SFX and stunt people who ... Read more »