Third installment in the god-awful series about the preening and posturing vampire-hunter out of Marvel Comics. The previous installment at least had the curiosity of a slumming Guillermo del Toro at the helm. He, in the meantime, took his slumming elsewhere (Hellboy), leaving the scriptwriter of the first two installments, …
Guillermo Del Toro(Mia Wasikowska, Jessica Chastain, Tom Hiddleston, and Charlie Hunnam.
From a narrated prologue that relates how a Renaissance alchemist fled to Vera Cruz during the Spanish Inquisition, how he tinkered away on a secret invention, and how he met his fate in a cave-in in 1937(!), the action proceeds with cautious pace and meticulous circumstantiation into what amounts to …
Ghost story from Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro (Cronos, Mimic), set in the Spanish Civil War at an ad hoc orphanage for the children of slain Loyalists (identified in the subtitles as "Leftists," to cut through the mists of ancient history). Cerebral, somber, sure-footed, and creepy (highly evocative image of …
For all the posh trappings of Ye Olde Haunted House and a Guillermo del Toro script, the horror is hokum. Guy Pearce is too busy fixing up the mansion to notice that his daughter (Bailee Madison), traumatized by his divorce, is losing her mind. She is also terrorized by tiny, …
Makes the case that the medium isn't just the message, it's the magic. Specifically, there's a reason why a painting on a movie poster can do a better job of capturing the spell-casting power of cinema than a photograph can. At least when the painter is humble workaday genius Drew …
People are sometimes afraid of what they don’t know… From the mind of Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Guillermo del Toro and award-winning stop-motion legend Mark Gustafson, it's a story you think you may know… but you don’t.
Alias H.B., alias Red, alias Big Monkey -- a horned demon unleashed by the Nazis and harnessed by the forces of good (namely the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense), his horns filed down to unmenacing stumps. A jokey comic-book adaptation (Dark Horse Comics) with delusions of grandeur. Guillermo Del …
A black mark on the record of director Guillermo del Toro, whose record, which started out so clean with Cronos in his native Mexico and Mimic in the Hollywood system, looks now a bit ink-stained: Blade II, the first and second Hellboy, and nothing else that comes close to those …
The real story, the background story, the astounding story, would tell of how a young Mexican director, with but a single art-house credit to his name, came to America to make a movie, made a completely commercial and conventional scare show, and held onto his integrity in the bargain. The …
What makes the 1946 adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham bleak tale of life far, far under the big top so unique was the curious combination of director Edmund Goulding (acclaimed for such “woman’s pictures” as Grand Hotel and Dark Victory), the backing of a Hollywood major (20th Century Fox), and …
Director Guillermo Del Toro goes for the gold, offering up a robots-punch-monsters movie tailor-made for the international market: modeled after Japanese anime, set largely in Hong Kong, featuring Chinese, Russian, and Australian heroes operating giant robots named with a German word, and offering a Brit (Idris Elba) as its emotional …
Guillermo Del Toro’s 2013 original (well, first, anyway) Pacific Rim was a genre love letter. The sequel is an exemplar, a big-budget actioner that goes about its bang-up business with skill and speed. (The only thing more breakneck than the pacing is director and co-writer Steven S. DeKnight’s frequency of …
Guillermo Del Toro’s 2013 original (well, first, anyway) Pacific Rim was a genre love letter. The sequel is an exemplar, a big-budget actioner that goes about its bang-up business with skill and speed. (The only thing more breakneck than the pacing is director and co-writer Steven S. DeKnight’s frequency of …