Despite being the movie that launched feature film animation as we know it, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is curiously underrated these days. Everyone knows it of course, it is far too iconic, but it seems rarely acknowledged both for its significance and its genuine strength as a movie, overshadowed certainly among my generation by the onslaught of the Disney Renaissance. But I think it remains to this day one of Disney’s most beautiful works and until now comparatively one of its least exploited. As Disney has found themselves running out of heavy-hitter titles to the nostalgia-brained of my generation for making pale modern copies of, they’ve finally made their way back to the last untouched princess movie in their classical canon, and also the movie that started it all. But in cannibalizing Snow White , Disney knowing the fact its not quite so beloved to their target demographic means there’s less pressure of fidelity. They don’t have to try so hard to replicate the ori...
It’s weird enough that there are two streaming-exclusive post-apocalypse movies starring cast-members from Stranger Things in 2025 without them dropping just a week apart. Watching O’Dessa felt like a touch of deja vu to me from just a week ago , only the experience wasn’t quite so obnoxious. Maybe next week there will be one with Finn Wolfhard for Amazon Prime that will be good. In fairness, O’Dessa comes very close to it at times. A bizarre movie from writer-director Geremy Jasper that adopts an intentionally archetypal structure that in some ways recalls George Miller’s recent Mad Max movies in their mythologically empowered apocalypses. It’s a fascinating context that feels boldly out of step with the kind of conventions of modern movie storytelling, that could use such a shake-up every now and again. Unfortunately, though O’Dessa doesn’t exactly lose the thread of that, it does get lost in spite of its flourishes. One of those flourishes is the fact tha...