Like The Stepford Wives, I’d avoided the original Rollerball due to a flaw over which it had no responsibility: spawning an unapologetically terrible remake. So, like Stepford, its recent appearance on Amazon Prime prompted an overdue first watch for Norman Jewison’s futuristic sports drama,...

Harry Palmer’s personal file reads like a permanent record: “Insubordinate, insolent, a trickster...perhaps with criminal tendencies.” When his new boss, another stiff-upper-lip with a patriotic apathy for human life, reads it back to him, Palmer cocks a proper Jack-the-Lad grin and admits,...

Though box office bombs come and go, some live on in infamy. Kevin Reynolds’ post-apocalyptic action flick Waterworld holds the usual traits of other bombs — big stars, questionable creative decisions and performances — except pitched to eleven. Conceptually based upon the catastrophic...

I grew up in the Rotten.com days. For the morbid adolescent, crime scene photos and grisly images of freak accidents were a click away. Now defunct, the site traded in the bizarre, lifting the beaded curtain to that shadowy forbidden room at the video store-- though  the treasures to be found...

One of the most excruciating and heartbreaking aspects to Bruce Lee’s death in 1973 – beyond his tender age (32) and the family he left behind – was the cruelty of its timing. He died on July 20th of that year; a mere six days later Enter the Dragon, his first American studio vehicle and the...

In the forty years since the release of Brian De Palma’s ​Dressed to Kill​, the conversation has shifted from the controversy at the time over his treatment of women to the film’s transphobic twist—that the killer is a trans woman. When the Criterion Collection added the film in 2015,...

By the 1980s, the art of composing music for films had undergone several sea changes. The craft moved from traditional orchestration and classically trained musicians during the days of the studio system to more broad and experimental venues, with some scores created completely electronically, and...

It is strange to consider how often teen movies are about young women, and how frequently those stories are told by men. Look at the genre output from the 1980s to the 2000s, and female screenwriters are rare; female directors, even more so. Molly Ringwald was a genre princess, but her reign of...

The Nightmare on Elm Street franchise is about Freddy Krueger. With his burn scars, his tattered red and green sweater, his worn brown hat, and his knife-fingered glove, Freddy (as played by Robert Englund) has become a pop-culture icon, even for people who’ve never seen any of the Nightmare...

On May 8, 1970, the AFL-CIO mobilized some two hundred New York City construction workers and sicc’ed them on about a thousand high school and college-aged protestors who were calling out the government’s actions abroad (the invasion of Cambodia) and at home (the Kent State Massacre occurred...

The 1980s, packed full of kid-driven adventure films, has just as many beautiful disasters as it does universally beloved hits. But to be included in either category requires a film to possess some sort of a legacy, be it positive or negative., The 1985 Helen Slater vehicle The Legend of Billie...

Truffaut’s famous dictum regarding the impossibility of ever making a truly anti-war film is, usually, equally applicable to movies about cops.  Today, in the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless others at the hands of law enforcement, much of the cultural...

The first two minutes of Robert Hiltzik’s 1983 feature film crawl forward from the lake setting with overwhelming Manfredini-esque horns and strings. It’s a heavy-handed prompt: you’re supposed to be scared. You’re getting the formula. Or are you?  Relatively bloodless and...

Demi Moore’s apartment in St. Elmo’s Fire is a truly fabulous sight to behold. Her living room walls are painted a shocking pink that offsets a self-consciously tasteful brown couch and armchair and geometric coffee table. The seating is piled high with pink, blue, and cream colored pillows....

“What do you think you are doing?” yells the village elder, to the boys he cannot see. “Playing a game? Who are you playing with?” Once he’s gone, the younger of the boys retraces the old man’s steps, marching and barking in a spot-on impersonation, and the older boy giggles. The...