8 years ago
All posts by Charles Bramesco
“Strangelove’s” Searing, Scathing, Satirical Sexual Shenanigans
Charles Bramesco writes about Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb," now on Criterion Blu-ray.
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Spoofing Off: The Death of American Parody Film
Why have spoof movies died off during the 21st century? Charles Bramesco explores this question.
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What Franchise Filmmaking Can Learn From “Lady Snowblood”
Pour yourself a stiff drink and take a gander at the slate of scheduled releases for 2016. If we were to cut out the nonsense subtitles and replace them with their rightful numerical ordering, we’d see that the dog days of summer alone will bring us Now You Se...
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“Creed” Is A Career-Making Film For Michael B. Jordan
The most frustrating aspect of this summer’s Fantastic Four—aside from a poor script, spotty authorial oversight, scads of exposition that went nowhere, Kate Mara’s hilarious wig, and approximately 527 other things—was its gross misuse of one Michael B. Jordan...
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“Trumbo” Is Unworthy of Its Extraordinary Subject
In a screenwriting career that spanned three decades, the man born James Dalton Trumbo did a little of everything. He penned feather-light romances like Roman Holiday, sweeping war pictures such as Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, a swords-and-sandals epic in Sparta...
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Realerotik: A Brief History of Live Sex in Cinema
In 1964, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart made history by using the most plain-and-simple phrasing in his vocabulary to express his definition of hardcore pornography, declaring, “I know it when I see it.” In the eleventh episode of the third season of the...
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“Crimson Peak” Is A New High For Guillermo del Toro
Guillermo del Toro will not be mistaken. He’d very much like for his new film, the magnificently wrought Crimson Peak, to not be spoken of as a horror film. On Twitter, he clarified that the film is a “Gothic Romance,” and then compared its tense creepiness to...
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In “The Brood,” Even Cronenberg’s Basics are Intricate
It’s a testament to the heady complexity of the later works of Canada’s proudest son David Cronenberg that a film as fully realized as 1979’s The Brood would be considered one of the basics of his deep filmography. He’s moved through so many phases as a stylis...
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“Yakuza Apocalypse” Is Loony and Incoherent
Somewhere near the climax of Takashi Miike’s unclassifiable new action flick Yakuza Apocalypse — a film arguably made up entirely of climaxes of differing intensity — a mysterious combatant in a ratty fleece frog suit reveals his final form. Battle with a rovi...
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“Moonrise Kingdom” Charts Wes Anderson’s Cozy World
There are movies we love and then there are movies we want to inhabit. Certain special films contain diegetic universes so immersive, so rich and seductively real, that the desire to be consumed and placed into their little worlds is a constant from viewer to ...
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