FORD PREFECT: Oh, Zaphod, this is a friend of mine, Arthur Dent. I saved him when his planet blew up.
ZAPHOD BEEBLEBROX: Oh sure, hi, Arthur, glad you could make it.
FORD PREFECT: And Arthur, this is my—
ARTHUR DENT: We’ve met.
FORD...
In 1975, Peter Weir’s debut film Picnic at Hanging Rock put Australia’s burgeoning art cinema squarely on the map, on its way to becoming a cult classic. Based on a novel by John Lindsay, the film has always had an air of “based on a true...
In 2008, 13-year-old Saoirse Ronan received her first Oscar nomination for Atonement, a British WWII melodrama based on an Ian McEwan novel about a fanciful girl named Briony Tallis who unwittingly unravels the lives of her sister Cecilia and...
Deadpool came in like a comet in 2016, grossing $783.1 million worldwide — fantastic for any movie, but unheard of for a hard-R superhero movie. Audiences responded to Ryan Reynolds’ Bugs-Bunny-on-meth take on the character, and to the way...
In Avengers: Infinity War, Josh Brolin is big and purple. His Thanos is the film’s lynchpin and its main character almost by default. Although his quest -- to halve the world’s population with a bunch of magical MacGuffins -- is fairly...
My brother and I like to bother each other and those around us with a game of soundtracks: When a deep, dark cut from a movie comes on the radio, one of us will turn to the other, smile like an executioner looking for a fresh neck, and ask:
...
This month marks the 10th anniversary of David Mamet’s mixed-martial-arts thriller Redbelt. In the intervening years, Mamet — the preeminent American playwright of his day, and one of the few screenwriters considered an auteur even when...
As college kids everywhere illegally stream or see Avengers: Infinity War in the theater, they might be looking pretty hard for the puffy guy — not Hulk or Thor but Happy Hogan. Iron Man’s lackey, played by Jon Favreau, didn't make it to...
In You Were Never Really Here, Lynne Ramsay continues to uphold her reputation for being an artist of uncompromising originality and skill. Despite only making four features in nearly two decades, the Scottish filmmaker’s work is studded with...
Eighteen feature films, more than 40 major characters, 10 years of stories, six Infinity Stones: There’s a lot going on in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It may seem daunting to try and recall all that’s happened before the premiere of...
When an Israeli pilot refused to take off for another shot out of sheer exhaustion, Menahem Golan threatened him at gunpoint until the landing gear left the ground. This early anecdote sets the tone for Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story...
'If you think this country’s bad off now, just wait till I get through with it.' — Rufus T. Firefly, Duck Soup
Armando Iannucci's historical farce The Death of Stalin — which traces the madcap scramble for power between members of...
Editor's note: After we'd published two of these columns, we discovered that Noel Mellor already has a well-established podcast and book called "Adventures in VHS." We chose the name at the last minute and neglected to check whether anyone was...
Animation saved Wes Anderson from self-parody.
By the time he released his fifth feature, the exotic Indian travelogue The Darjeeling Limited (2007), even many of Anderson’s biggest fans (myself among them) had begun to grow a little wary of...
With his Best Adapted Screenplay win for Call Me by Your Name, James Ivory received some long-overdue recognition from the Academy. (He also became, at 89, the oldest winner in any category in Oscar history.) His prior nominations – all in the...
