It’s a common enough sight in Christmas films: holiday shoppers admiring animatronic window displays and taking advantage of the sales at department stores while appropriate music plays over the loudspeakers. In 1984’s hard-to-find Comfort and Joy, which opens with a rendition of “God Rest...

Washington Irving’s 1820 short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is a classic of Gothic horror, an atmospheric and ambiguous tale about a schoolmaster named Ichabod Crane who encounters a possibly supernatural foe known as the Headless Horseman. Tim Burton’s film Sleepy Hollow, released...

“Another movie from an old TV show,” sighs a character at the beginning of 2000’s Charlie’s Angels when confronted with the fictional T.J. Hooker: The Movie. Coming at around the same time as the feature-film versions of Mission: Impossible, The Mod Squad, The Avengers and Wild Wild West,...

1999 is considered one of the strongest years of cinema in living memory. There will no doubt be countless articles in 2019 marking the 20th anniversaries of that year’s greatest hits and examining their impact and legacy. But this column isn’t about those movies. This column is about the...

In 1989, the popularity of the Nightmare On Elm Street series and its flagship character, Freddy Krueger, were still going strong. Wes Craven, who'd created them both, had parted ways with the series due to creative differences, and his attempts to break out of horror with hybrid films like the...

We knew on Jan. 1, 2000, that the hysteria surrounding Y2K had been overblown. But before that, the fears that the so-called “Millennium Bug” would cause computers to cease working (or, at the very least, display the wrong date) had engendered a hundred-billion-dollar cottage industry of...

Ever since the proliferation of the mobile phone, horror filmmakers have to go out of their way to explain why their characters can’t use them to get out of whatever horror-movie scenario they’ve landed in. Either someone complains they can’t get a signal – prompting everyone else in the...

The fictional metropolis of Gotham has long been a stand-in for New York City, and with Joker, director Todd Phillips borrows (you might even say outright steals) from several New York movies of the 1970s and early ‘80s that showed the city’s skuzzier side, including The King of Comedy (1983),...

Quiz Show opens with a sale. Its first scene follows investigator Dick Goodwin (Rob Morrow) as he speaks with a car salesman about the latest and greatest Chrysler 300. He learns about its features: a state-of-the-art radio, 17 coats of paint, and more power than anyone in Washington. The salesman...

Perhaps the most notable example of a prominent movie genre that disappeared almost entirely is the Western. Once inescapable — there were close to 100 Westerns released in 1949 alone — nowadays Westerns are usually seen as retro or niche. The fading prevalence of the genre was observantly...

“It’s 1927. We’re modern folk!” Lady Edith’s husband Bertie (Harry Hadden-Paton) declares in Downton Abbey when he and his wife (Laura Carmichael) arrive at the Crawley family estate without any servants in tow. That’s one of the few nods to changing times in the feature-film...

Long before he corralled some of the screen’s most skilled improvisers to make such classic mockumentaries as Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, and A Mighty Wind, Christopher Guest served his apprenticeship as a performer with the National Lampoon. As the magazine branched out into other media...

1999 is considered one of the strongest years of cinema in living memory. There will no doubt be countless articles in 2019 marking the 20th anniversaries of that year’s greatest hits and examining their impact and legacy. But this column isn’t about those movies. This column is about the...

The idea of people pushed to their limits serves as the bedrock for countless works of art, from revenge tragedies to superhero blockbusters. But the idea that someone can learn the most about themselves in extreme circumstances is itself pushed to the limits in two films celebrating their 40th...

Tim Burton's 1994 biopic Ed Wood introduces its title character during his days operating on the fringes of the Los Angeles theater scene in the late 1940s. As the film opens, Ed's directing a performance of his own World War II-themed play, The Casual Company, at an obscure little playhouse with a...