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...

Blue Steel feels like an overlooked entry in Kathryn Bigelow’s filmography. It doesn’t have the online appeal of Point Break, from which Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze gifs populate Twitter timelines. It doesn’t have the history-making distinction of The Hurt Locker, for which Bigelow...