Cinefantastique Online

You are browsing the archives of 2009 May.

Hollywood Reporter’s Michael Rechtshaffen says that Pixar’s newest animated film – this time in 3-D – “raises the bar to wondrous new heights.”
Winsome, touching and arguably the funniest Pixar effort ever, the gorgeously rendered, high-flying adventure is a tidy 90-minute distillation of all the signature touches that came before it.
It’s also the ideal choice to [...]

Hollywood Reporter’s Peter Brunette saw Lars Von Triers’ art house horror film ANTICHRIST at Cannes, but he didn’t much like what he saw.
With his latest offering, “Antichrist,” Danish bad-boy director Lars von Trier is in no danger of jeopardizing his reign as the most controversial major director working today. Visually gorgeous to a fault and [...]

Science fiction and fantasy films had launched the summer box office season to a great start thanks to STAR TREK and X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE, but this weekend they were passed up by the debut of ANGELS & DEMONS, director Ron Howard’s sequel to his 2006 blockbuster. Not to worry: both TREK and WOLVERINE posted strong [...]

Our sister website, Hollywood Gothique, which covers fantasy films, mystery movies, Halloween horror and science fiction cinema events in Los Angeles, is giving away tickets to a quartet of classic black-and-white movies from the Golden Age of Horror. To celebrate the Return of Famous Monsters of Filmland – the original monster movie magazine -American Cinematheque [...]

On Wednesay, May 21, I will step beyond the cinematic graveyard for a rare excursion onto the stage. No, I am not making my acting debut in a one-man version of Dracula; rather, I will be moderating a discussion panel after a performance of Courting Vampires, a new play making its debut in Pasadena, California.
On [...]

The Stench vs. The Pudge: A Stink Monster (Takayuki Haranishi, left) makes acquaintance with ambivalent hero Dai Nipponjin (Hitoshi Matsumoto, right) in BIG MAN JAPAN
Welcome back to kaiju world: big, honkin’ monster attacks Japan, big, honkin’ hero comes around to kick butt. Only in this case, the hero, Dai Nipponjin (literally “Great Japanese”), is a [...]

Will the new TERMINATOR explore apocalyptic anxiety regarding technology and nuclear annihilation in a new way?
The local fire station used to be located a few more blocks to the east of us. Within the last couple of months, the local city police and fire departments secured separate facilities, which means that the fire department is [...]

This is the first first time the cast of STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION stepped out of the television tube and into theatres; unfortunately, even more than the six STAR TREK films that preceded it, STAR TREK: GENERATIONS suffers from the feeling that it is  only a bigger budgeted episode of the television show, one that fails to [...]

By the time this film reached theatres in 1998, viewers knew better than to expect good science-fiction from STAR TREK features. The franchise had long since reached the level where the selling point was not to “go where no one has gone before” but to put familiar characters through familiar paces, preferably by reviving some [...]

This is the eighth film in the STAR TREK franchise and the second to feature the cast of THE NEXT GENERATION. True to the tradition of TREK films (odd numbered entries and disappointing; even numbered ones are good), this is a considerable improvement over the previous entry, STAR TREK: GENERATIONS. The plot involves an Enterprise [...]

In retrospect, it should be no surprise that Tim Burton was drawn to Roald Dahl’s novel CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY. Burton’s films have tended to focus on what we might call “demented artists” — that is, people with enormous creativity whose imaginative flights of fancy make them seem weird, abnormal, and even, on occasion, [...]

Two weeks ago, I was interviewed on the subject of this summer’s science-fiction, fantasy, and horror movies for The Chronic Rift. The Rift is a website podcast of an old New York-based cable access show from the ’90s; a couple times a month they provide news, reviews and analysis about what’s going on in the world of [...]

With Paramount turning their STAR TREK vaults upside down and shaking out everything having to do with the original cast in preparation for the release of the (spectacular) J J Abrams film, there has been an embarrassment of riches for fans, bringing us Blu-Ray releases of the ’66-’67 series and the first 6 films, available as [...]