Gorgeous colors and graceful poetic images mark The Red Turtle (La tortue rouge), a wordless 80-minute animated film co-produced by the famed Japanese Studio Ghibli and Dutch animator Michael Dudok de Wit. Made in France, the dialogue-free film was produced by Takahata Isao and co-written by French director Pascale Ferran whose 2014 film “Bird People”…
American philosopher William James said that, “Reality, life, experience, concreteness, immediacy, use what word you will, exceeds our logic, overflows, and surrounds it.” This statement is especially true for children whose goals and dreams are subject not only to the real problems they face but are in part determined by their parent’s ability to handle…
“Original” would seem the last word one should use to describe a current kids’ movie about the friendship between a boy and his dragon that is both a remake and a sort of “E.T.” clone, but it is what it is. As Disney is knee-deep in pillaging their catalog of classics for profits, they’ve managed…
Every once in a while, there are films that reaffirm their genres. That’s not to say that they’ve suffered without them, but true gems are few and far between. I consider “Let the Right One In” to be one of these gems among the horror sub-genres. I’d consider Spike Jonze’s “Her” a contender for romance,…
The opening shots of Nine Lives are composed of actual cat videos ripped straight from the internet. It’s incredibly fitting, because Nine Lives feels about as funny as a cat video, but runs almost 86 minutes longer than most of those. When a premise is this tired, the final product is only as good as…
I was only nine years old when the first “Ice Age” came out in 2002, but my memories of it are very fond. While it hasn’t aged as gracefully as I’d hoped in recent years, I still regard it as one of my favorite childhood movies because of its great character dynamics and clever Looney…
The dog days of the summer schlockbusters are upon us and soon we will be inundated with mediocre and below average films such as the new “Ghostbusters,” another “Ice Age” installment and the dismal “Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates,” among others. Trying to fight this deluge, though, is the animated feature from Universal Pictures…
