I when The Wind Rises was going to be Hayao Miyazaki’s last film. That was a confusing time. Every film before it received obligate acclaim after Spirited Away’s Oscar win, but now critics were burdened with this new weight of expectation to adequately praise the master’s final word as a filmmaker.

Was Miyazaki really ending a career defined by high-flying fantasy with a historical biopic? (ittedly, it was still about airplanes.) This was going to be hard to evaluate,…

Did you know there was already a live-action, English-language Mobile Suit Gundam movie? Did you know it was made in Canada??? I’ve only seen about 4 or 5 Gundam anime of the fifty-eleven-some-odd produced so far, so this strange slice of trivia escaped my notice, but it’s true. While Hollywood has bat around the Gundam rights like Haro on a string for the better part of a decade, Vancouver B.C. had already answered the call from Sunrise way back in…

Hell yeah, the train is back on the tracks. Tom Cruise finally started using his influence as a producer to show off his prowess as a stunt performer, beyond the occasional rock climbing and falling through wind tunnels on green screens.

In the spaces between its juiced-up action scenes, MI:4 embraces its cheesy roots like never before through the enthusiasm of Brad Bird. It's his first live-action feature, but Bird's cartoonish sense of timing and shot composition matches the needs…

I will never stop thinking about how perfectly Furiosa dovetails into Fury Road. The pitfalls of the prequel are well known to any genre fan still slogging through years of franchise fatigue from the same four IPs. But unlike the sequel, the prequel is almost a bad idea right there on paper. Why spend long hours struggling to build up suspense or mystery around the logline from a more famous story? We know the better tale has already been told…

In the same week that OpenAI takes bold new strides toward ruining everything by coming for Hayao Miyazaki specifically, GKIDS and audiences all over the US honored Studio Ghibli this weekend with a successful IMAX run of his greatest cinematic accomplishment. Since Miya-san is a man of many masterpieces, maybe it's in a 4 or 5-way tie for his greatest that we could debate forever, but Princess Mononoke stands its ground confidently at the center of that center podium.

The…