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...

Genre filmmaking is a precise art, and yes, that includes the much-maligned romantic comedy. A number of intangibles all have to click together to make the whole thing work: the chemistry of the leads, the effectiveness of the meet-cute, the difficulty of the obstacles facing the relationship, the...

It is slightly cynical (but not necessarily inaccurate) to describe Disney’s business strategy for the last decade or so as built, almost entirely, on nostalgia. The “live-action,” sometimes even shot-for-shot, remakes of animated classics like The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin,...

Scary stories are inherently political. How couldn’t they be? They tap into our greatest fears, and whatever those happen to be is a commentary on society at any given time. But the most enduring horror films also evolve over time, morphing to represent different fears as new socio-political...

It’s hard to believe now, but there was a time when comic book characters had little to no hope of success in Hollywood. Films adapted from comic magazines or newspaper “funnies” were few, given that the properties were seen as substandard material suitable only for children (or worse,...

Early on in Fletch Won, the eighth published novel in the series by Gregory McDonald and the first chronologically, Irwin Maurice Fletcher is reassigned to the society pages of the Los Angeles News-Tribune. “Frank, I don’t believe in society.” “That’s okay, Fletch. Society...

In 1998, Stanley Kubrick accepted the D.W. Griffith Award from the Director’s Guild of America. In his acceptance speech, he compared Griffith to the Grecian myth of Icarus. Like Icarus, Griffith flew too close to the sun, but instead of his wax-and-feather wings melting, Griffith was shunned by...

When Grand Central Publishing released a new edition of the novel First Blood in 2000, author David Morrell penned an introduction, attempting to bridge the gap between the character he wrote in the early 1970s and the version of that character that had been lodged into pop consciousness by (at...

The Shakespeare adaptations of the 1990s and early 2000s are unified by an excess of style, and by a series of big risks. The nightmarish bleakness of Julie Taymor’s Titus, the MTV surrealism of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, the earnest romanticism of Gil Junger’s 10 Things I Hate About...

Several years ago, while parsing out my love for the films of the late, lamented Tony Scott, I came to a realization: I am a Crimson Tide guy, living in a Top Gun world. While the earlier film, a gorgeously shot and technically stunning action-drama about hotshot Navy fighter pilots, remains a...

Proto-indie filmmaker Roger Corman once said, “Motion pictures are the art form of the 20th century, and one of the reasons is the fact that films are a slightly corrupted artform. They fit this century – they combine art and business!” Not the most romantic sentiment from the Pit and the...

These days, Hunter S. Thompson is arguably more famous as a movie character than he is a writer.  Founder of the ‘Gonzo’ school of journalism and a manic, drug-addled Jiminy Cricket to America’s troubled conscience during the brutal twilight years of the Free Love era, Thompson began as a...

Sofia Coppola’s career is nearly universally concerned with the unspoken loneliness of womanhood, and her directorial debut, The Virgin Suicides, often feels like a partially grasped memory or a half-forgotten dream. Her 1999 adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’s 1993 novel is hazy and sun-kissed,...

When Mary Harron’s American Psycho hit theaters twenty years ago, it sent shockwaves through mainstream cinema. It was daring, intelligent, and bolstered by a chillingly charismatic leading performance from Christian Bale as the malevolent Patrick Bateman. But like many films of its ilk, this...

HandMade Films was formed by George Harrison and his business manager, Denis O’Brien, for the express purpose of bankrolling Monty Python’s Life of Brian – so it was only natural that the company became a clearinghouse for Python-related film projects in the early ’80s. These included Live...