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Three Phases of Pixar History

Peter Chattaway has just posted some thoughts he’s previously shared elsewhere regarding the shape of Pixar’s body of work to date, and I’ve long thought it’s a brilliant theory.

Timbuktu REVIEW

Timbuktu (2015)

A haunting scene in Timbuktu depicts two teams of young athletes running back and forth on a field engaged in offensive and defensive patterns familiar the world over: kicking, dribbling, passing, blocking. All that is missing is a ball and goal markers.

REVIEW

The Time Machine (2002)

The Time Machine is so sloppy that it makes Kate and Leopold look like Back to the Future. It’s also pitiful entertainment, succeeding neither as spectacle, as action-adventure, or as love story.

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Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy [video]

Here’s my 30-second take on Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

Titanic REVIEW

Titanic (1997)

It kills me to say it, but give the devil his due: James Cameron is the king of the world.

REVIEW

To Have and Have Not (1944)

Howard Hawks’s more or less in-name-only adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s “worst novel,” has more in common with Casablanca (including nearly half a dozen players) than with its ostensible source material. Its real claim to fame, though, is the first pairing of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, who appeared together in only three other films but remained ever after linked off the screen.

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To Rome, with Love [video]

To Rome, with Love in 60 seconds: my “Reel Faith” review.

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To the Wonder [video]

To the Wonder in 60 seconds: my “Reel Faith” review.

Tolkien REVIEW

Tolkien (2019)

“One of my strongest opinions,” J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in a 1971 letter, “is that investigation of an author’s biography … is an entirely vain and false approach to his works.”

Tolkien and Lewis disliked <em>Snow White</em>. You know who wouldn&#8217;t have? POST

Tolkien and Lewis disliked Snow White. You know who wouldn’t have?

Indeed, it would be impossible to imagine Tolkien — a brilliant worldbuilder and a famously purist curmudgeon who disliked Lewis’s own Narnia stories, a sentiment contrasting greatly with Lewis’ enormous esteem for Tolkien’s Middle-earth — being anything but appalled by Disney’s silly dwarfs, with their slapstick humor, nursery-moniker names, and singsong musical numbers.

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Tolkien and Lewis, Action Heroes?

Word that Eagle Eye co-writer Travis Adam Wright has been tapped to script a planned adaptation of James A. Owen’s fantasy series The Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica has kicked off a flurry of coverage on Owen’s series, which casts the Inklings—J. R. R. Tokien, C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams, as well as Owen Barfield and Hugo Dyson—as heroes of epic fantasy adventures weaving together Arthurian legend, Greek mythology and the writings of other British writers, not to mention the writers themselves—among other things.

Tomb Raider REVIEW

Tomb Raider (2018)

Jolie’s Lara was perhaps having too much fun for much sense of urgency, but Vikander’s Lara isn’t really having fun at all, which makes it hard for the audience to have much fun either.

Tomorrowland REVIEW

Tomorrowland (2015)

Tomorrowland argues that the future is as dark or as bright as we choose to make it; that artists, scientists and dreamers can save the world; that the dystopian post-apocalyptic nightmares dominating popular culture are killing us, and are no more inevitable or realistic than the Space-Age techno-optimism of Disney’s Tomorrowland and EPCOT, Roddenberry-era Star Trek and even The Jetsons.

Too good not to be true: Two movies about the Thailand cave rescue ARTICLE

Too good not to be true: Two movies about the Thailand cave rescue

Perhaps you were glued to the news in 2018 as the world followed the ultimately successful efforts in Thailand to rescue the 12 young boys of a soccer team and their assistant coach from the Tham Luang Nang Non cave who had become trapped by sudden flooding. If you haven’t checked in on the story since then, though, you have no idea.

ARTICLE

Top 10 Movie Dads

Picking the top 10 movie dads was both easier and harder than picking the top 10 movie moms. Easier, because there were more candidates to choose from — and harder for the same reason!

Top 10 Movie Moms ARTICLE

Top 10 Movie Moms

When I set out to make a list of great movie moms in honor of Mother’s Day, I knew it wouldn’t be easy — but I soon found it even harder than I thought. Let’s face it: Great mothers are in short supply in the movies.

Top 10 Superhero Movies ARTICLE

Top 10 Superhero Movies

Why do we love costumed crusaders? Larger-than-life heroes fill a cultural niche occupied in the 1950s by gunslingers, in earlier centuries by Robin Hood and King Arthur, and in antiquity by the likes of Hercules, Perseus, and Odysseus.

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Top 5 Fairy Tale Movies

Fairy tales are everywhere these days, from the small-screen “Once Upon a Time” and “Grimm” to this year’s duelling Snow White films, Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman, opening this week.

Top Gun: Maverick REVIEW

Top Gun: Maverick (2022)

Top Gun: Maverick is more than a nostalgia sequel or legacyquel; it is almost more than a movie. It is a manifesto and a monument, a defiant time capsule and a swaggering IMAX spectacle without precedent or peer.

REVIEW

Top Hat (1935)

The quintessential Fred-and-Ginger vehicle, Top Hat features some of the most glorious, memorable dance sequences ever filmed.