Eric Henderson

The Seventh Seal, assisted by cinematographer Gunnar Fischer’s richly overexposed images, operates as though it contains the undiluted essence of life’s fueling dialectic formula. Occasionally it does, most notably in the terrifying arrival of the self-flagellants to a weak-willed village. But the road-trippers in Bergman’s follow-up, Wild Strawberries, achieve a far greater grace and clarity with only a fraction of the heavy lifting.

The Little Mermaid is the story of one packrat pre-tween princess whose undersea kingdom is only matched in depth by her remarkable sense of consumer-minded entitlement.

Despite its prodigious charms, it has probably destroyed more lives than any other Disney film, forcing a specific, unrealistic romantic archetype that truly does only exist in fairy tales onto generations of impressionable children, who would grow up desperate, needy, and crushed.

This was hot stuff in the mid-’50s, but beneath the sleazy coating covering the film (camp aficionados take note) is an unabashed and moderately retrograde plea for community openness.

Steeped in De Palma's glorious violence and sinuous cinematography, but stripped of his tricky sensuality and his anarchic self-reflective wit, The Untouchables boils down to a lot of talk.

A bald rehash of Jaws, only with the Moby Dick elements played up even further, Orca isn’t a cheap thrill (producer Dino Di Laurentiis was also the man behind the idiotic-but-exhilarating King Kong remake), but it sure does seem like it’s in a rush to finish.

Befitting its middle-ish chronological position, it’s not surprising that the serviceably cute but mundane Lady—a turn-of-the-century ditty about two love struck dogs from opposite sides of the gated community—might be the most ignorable, least assertive production of their golden era.

It has the core of a genuine crowd-pleaser, but unfortunately something bigger and more all-consuming keeps getting into its head.

Peter Pan, in retrospect, seems much more a footnote among the studio’s 1950s output.

Martin Scorsese's keyed-up, irreverent tone frequently fails to distinguish itself from the grunting arias sung by the oily paragons of commerce his film evidently intended to deflate.

Haunting, remote, and workmanlike, Blast of Silence may be the only film I’ve ever seen with a trip on the Station Island Ferry in which I expected a tumbleweed to flit across the deck.

A limp, shapeless mess of a film trades in a genuine respect for westerns’ tropes for purile vulgarity and joy-buzzer showmanship.

The expansion has the unintended and unfortunate effect of doing exactly the same thing to Alexander he accused his family of doing in the first place: marginalizing him.

This new Boys in the Band is a Matryoshka doll of period piecery, a flashback of a flashback of a flashback.

It cashes in on trendy retroism instead of utilizing the perspective of, to borrow from Joni Mitchell, seeing clowns from both sides now.

The film is riddled with an unmistakably misogynistic bent, and can’t be bothered to supply one single likable soul.

Once the money shots of Darren Aronofsky's version recede, it becomes ever more clear that his intention is to tackle the capriciousness of Old Testament logic. And, ultimately, to assent to it.

If there isn’t a single element in the entire film that’s not derivative of the studio’s then-recent past, you can’t blame them for sticking with what worked best—business models-cum-creative habits conditioned by horsewhip die hard, if at all.

Maybe it's not the worst thing in the world that Storks doesn't take many cues from Pixar's tear-jerking playbook.

Marshall arguably intends for societal 20/20 hindsight to provide the bulk of perspective throughout.

A bald-faced lamprey hitching its razor-tipped maw on the chassis of The Exorcist, The Omen’s Sunday-school parable of gothic Cathsploitation comes twice as thick and thrice as pious.

Far from seeming like a strategic element created to define Lady Gaga's reinvention, the documentary instead feels like a natural outgrowth of it.

Keanu is declawed by design, but it's hard not to wonder what the cat could've dragged in.

Despite some satisfyingly gut-busting moments, The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue retains a very British stiff upper lip.

Uneven and amateurish, with a sense of vulgarity that’s now dated enough to seem downright Victorian, The Kentucky Fried Movie proves the maxim, “comedy is in the eye of the beholder.”

Beyond the forthright identity politics and titillating theatrical misdemeanors, one still comes away wondering about the things that remain concealed.

Saludos Amigos and its sequel (or, more accurately, expansion), The Three Caballeros, had a shelf life significantly shorter than that of your standard MRE. Together, they kicked off nearly a decade’s worth of anthology-based wastes of time and resources that all but derailed Disney’s manifest destiny to rewrite children’s dreams in the corporation’s own latently art deco, actively anti-twat image until Cinderella put the needle back on the record.

Few, if any, single-shot movies ever justify the conceit. In fact, most of them do their material a disservice through the distraction that emerges naturally from the trickery.

There's something to be said for a summer movie that offers up Chris Colfer as an unapologetic misogynist hairdresser.

It’s an amateur star performance-as-Stanislavski mail order catalog: a powerhouse of Method-ology (born more from a lack of acting experience than pop singers’ already refined sense of emotive abandon), complete with ingénue tics, a self-conscious display of age range, tentative ad-libs, flailing limbs, leaky eyes, precariously receding eyelids.

Child’s Play is only a shade more terrifying than Teddy Ruxpin.

Any potential subtext of Munro Leaf's children's book has been bleached out in the marketplace-oriented Ferdinand.

As if trying to put quotation marks around its disposability, 1949’s Neptune’s Daughter uses a perpetually underwhelmed narrator to undercut its central love story, surrounded by polo antics and swimwear fashionistas.

To be blunt, because there was just barely enough material in the source text to pad out the film, the filmmakers also used a lot of the stuff that worked in novel form but came off as stultifying on the screen.

To hose down the white elephant in the room right off the bat, yes, it falls into place as a coming-of-age spin on the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype.

It's a buzzkill to enter the world of Minions primed for a tidal wave of gibberish-talking lemmings to tear the roof off, only to see them once again led astray by the ordinariness of human affairs.

It's a pity that no one else involved in the making of the film had Dwayne Johnson's sly intuition.

Slap together a modestly budgeted horror film with an unmistakable resemblance to a recent hit film (Gremlins) and a notable inversion of another popular film’s ending (Poltergeist), insert just enough Podunk camp to ensure Joe Bob Briggs would catch its scent and you’ll guarantee yourself the birth of a franchise.

There are only clichés in this rise-and-fall material, with the sole distinctive wrinkle being the weight given to the rise versus the fall.

The choreography, the performances, the set decoration, the dialogue, everything about Hello, Dolly! is played directly to the back row of the theater, which would be fine on the stage, but on anamorphic widescreen close-ups tends to be more frightening than mirthful.

Though the film is obviously coated with a veneer of nostalgic sentimentality, Eastwood never lets Honkytonk Man veer into maudlin territory.

No matter how much director Mark Lester attempts to hide his sermonizing behind sensationalistic-pedagogic terrorism, he does himself in whenever a jaded cop shrugs his shoulders and grunts, for the umpteenth time, What can we do, they’re juveniles?

With an enviable, well-stocked cast of character thespians and a carefully dilapidated motel set, Eaten Alive is all ingredients, no recipe.

The film transcends the déjà vu of its borrowed trappings but ironically sacrifices all momentum in favor of a long series of physical tests.

Unfortunately, the haphazard, showy cross-cutting between Laine’s to-the-camera narration and the flashbacks (sometimes to scenes he couldn’t possibly recollect) do little to hide the fact that Romero, like his aimless protagonist, seemingly couldn’t care less.

Novelty and Melissa McCarthy’s comedic chops only carry Life of the Party to midterms, and it soon becomes apparent that it’s a star vehicle without any engine.

A Little Golden Book version of drastically simplified socialism accompanied with a healthy dose of warmongering bravado.

Unabashedly lefty sentiment colors the whole film.

The sequel’s cure proves infinitely bloodier than the original’s disease, and its over-the-top depictions of brimstone and flesh are so loopy and unmoored, you’d swear the place where nobody dared to go suddenly became Xanadu.

At its best, Poltergeist III recalls that surreal mix of DIY ingenuity and narrative ineptitude that mark some of Lucio Fulci’s lesser efforts. At its worst, well, it’s just another soulless, hacky-tacky horror sequel.

There’s only so much that director Charles Stone III can do with the script’s “head held high” cornpone.

It’s Lifetime. It’s camp. It’s seriously confused, and it should speak directly to drag queens in straight relationships everywhere.

There's much more plot floating around during the sequel, all leading up to a climax at the "KEN Conference" that suffers in comparison to Silicon Valley's mockery of the same milieu.