films – Page 2

Watch Godzilla Minus One in dazzling black and white during limited US run

A masterful remastering —

“By eliminating color, a new sense of reality emerges.”

Jennifer Ouellette – Jan 17, 2024 7: 32 pm UTC

Watch Godzilla Minus One in dazzling black and white during limited US run — Toho Inc.

The critically acclaimed film, Godzilla Minus One, hit US theaters in early December and racked up $51 million in the US alone and over $96 million globally, shooting past 2016’s Shin Godzilla as the most successful Japanese-produced Godzilla film to date. The film is winding down its theatrical run, but director, writer, and VFX supervisor Takashi Yamazaki has remastered a black-and-white version of the film as an homage to the 1954 classic Godzilla, released in Japan last week. And now US audiences will have a chance to see that version when Godzilla Minus One/Minus Color arrives at AMC theaters in the US for a limited run from January 26 through February 1.

(Minor spoilers for Godzilla Minus One below.)

Yamakazi spent three years writing the script for Godzilla Minus One, drawing inspiration not just from the original 1954 film but also Jaws (1975), Godzilla, Mothra and Ghidorah (2001), Shin Godzilla, and the films of Hayao Miyazaki. He opted to set the film in postwar Japan, like the original, rather than more recent events like the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011, in order to explore themes of postwar trauma and emerging hope. The monster itself was designed to be horrifying, with spiky dorsal fins and a bellowing roar produced by recording an amplified roar in a large stadium.

The plot follows a former WWII kamikaze pilot named Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) who encountered Godzilla in 1945 when the monster attacked a Japanese base on Odo Island, but failed to act to help save the garrison. His parents were killed when Tokyo was bombed, so Shikishima is grappling with serious survivor’s guilt a few years later as he struggles to rebuild his life with a woman named Noriko (Minami Hamabe) and a rescued orphaned baby. Then Godzilla mutates and re-emerges for a renewed attack on Japan, and Shikishima gets the chance to redeem himself by helping to destroy the kaiju.

Godzilla Minus One was received with almost universal critical acclaim, with some declaring it not just one of the best films released in 2023 but possibly one of the best Godzilla films ever made. (We didn’t include the film in our own year’s best list because no Ars staffers had yet seen the film when the list was compiled, but it absolutely merits inclusion.) Among other accolades, the film made the Oscar shortlist for Best Visual Effects.

It was a painstaking process to remaster Godzilla Minus One into black and white. “Rather than just making it monochrome, it is a cut-by-cut,” Yamakazi said in a statement last month. “I had them make adjustments while making full use of various mattes as if they were creating a new movie. What I was aiming for was a style that looked like it was taken by masters of monochrome photography. We were able to unearth the texture of the skin and the details of the scenery that were hidden in the photographed data. Then, a frightening Godzilla, just like the one in the documentary, appeared. By eliminating color, a new sense of reality emerges.”

Godzilla Minus One/Minus Color will have a limited run in US AMC theaters from January 26 through February 1, 2024.

Film Technica: Our favorite movies of 2023

best of 2023, culture, end of year content, Entertainment, Features, films / Paul Patrick / December 26, 2023

Warning: Although we’ve done our best to avoid spoiling anything too major, please note this list does include a few specific references to several of the listed films that some might consider spoiler-y.

It’s been an odd couple of years for film as the industry struggles to regain its footing in the wake of a devastating global pandemic, but there are reasons to be optimistic about its future, both from a box office and variety standpoint. This was the year that the blockbuster superhero franchises that have dominated for more than a decade finally showed signs of faltering; the Marvel and DC Universe releases this year were mostly fine, but only one (Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse) made our 2023 year-end list. There were just so many of them, one after the other, adding up to serious superhero fatigue.

We still love our blockbusters, of course. This was also the summer of “Barbenheimer,” as audiences flocked to theaters for the unlikely pairing of Barbie and Oppenheimer, breaking a few box office records in the process. It was also a good year for smaller niche fare—including two re-imaginings of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—as well as a new film from the legendary Martin Scorsese (Killers of the Flower Moon).

As always, we’re opting for an unranked list, with the exception of our “year’s best” vote at the very end, so you might look over the variety of genres and options and possibly add surprises to your eventual watchlist. We invite you to head to the comments and add your favorite films released in 2023.

D&D: Honor Among Thieves.” height=”426″ src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/dungeons1-640×426.jpg” width=”640″>

Enlarge / Chris Pine and Michelle Rodriguez star as Elgin (a bard) and Holga (a barbarian) in D&D: Honor Among Thieves.

Paramount Pictures

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

Over two decades later, I am still a bit bitter about paying good money to see the 2000 Dungeons and Dragons movie with a group of friends on opening night. To this day, we’ll still parody Empress Savina dramatically proclaiming something along the lines of “I declare all people equal!” at the end of the movie (spoilers for a decades-old bad movie, I guess). Honor Among Thieves didn’t have a high bar to clear to wash the taste of that horrible adaptation out of my mouth. So it was nice to find that this new take on the D&D world leapt miles over that bar with a madcap, character-driven adventure that would be the envy of many a dungeon master.

While Honor Among Thieves drops in a few references to familiar D&D items and creatures (hi, owlbears!), the movie wisely realizes that it can’t lean on those references to make an interesting movie. Instead, it uses D&D’s class system as the basis for some broad, trope-y characters to get thrown into an unlikely partnership. Chris Pine’s winning take on a bard is the driving force here, but Michelle Rodriguez’s barbarian and (an underutilized) Regé-Jean Page’s paladin steal plenty of scenes by really hewing true to their characters’ alignment chart.

The plot won’t win any awards for originality or surprise, but that character work and some well-paced action set pieces make this a thrilling family adventure, even for those who’ve never touched a D&D character sheet.

—Kyle Orland

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