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 already using it -- totally our mistake. We apologize...

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 his — there’s no other way to put this — shtick....

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 Best Director category – were for A Room with a...

The arena. The Pongitron. “How’s that for a bad hit, Team Leader?” The Ball Chase. The music of Guns N’ Roses. The liberation of Pong City One. Any of these phrases instantly brings to mind one of the most notorious cult films of all time: Pong: The Motion Picture. Released in December...

As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, the 1980s weren’t a great time to be a female. The end of second-wave feminism in the ‘70s left many Americans believing equality among the sexes was “solved.” As author Susan Faludi described, there was a backlash that sought to undo everything the...

In January, Wired magazine released a video that, in their words, “breaks down the history of people miniaturization in movies.” VFX Supervisor Jamie Price covers films through the decades depicting humans who have been shrunken down or were tiny to begin with. While he does an expert job of...

In 1963, Betty Friedan published her landmark work The Feminine Mystique, which analyzed the dramatic shift in women’s roles in postwar America and helped launch what came to be known as second-wave feminism. Women were suddenly marrying younger, having more children, and were largely...

Nothing sells me on a movie faster than a title song that just reiterates the plot in a catchy way, and they don’t come much catchier than the title song of the only movie the founder of Motown Records ever produced. Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon (1985) opens like the attract mode of an...

The greatest Method actors create visceral moments through raw talent and polished techniques. Throughout his film career, Marlon Brando delivered numerous iconic lines, beginning with “Stella!” in Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). Similarly, James Dean — a noted Brando...

Before the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, the director most commonly associated with getting down was Adrian Lyne. His films — Foxes (1980), Flashdance (1983), 9 1/2 Weeks (1986), Fatal Attraction (1987), Jacob's Ladder (1990), Indecent Proposal (1993), Lolita (1997), and Unfaithful (2002) —...

This article contains spoilers for Hellraiser, Hellbound: Hellraiser II, and Hellraiser: Hellseeker. Since it was coined by Carol J. Clover in her book Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, the term “final girl” has become ubiquitous. Many essays, retrospectives, and...

“There is something about this middle-aged bald guy that is thrilling!” A Curb Your Enthusiasm joke that’s as much about middle-aged bald guy Larry David as the show resting on his slumped shoulders, it also calls into question the unlikely appeal of the action sub-genre represented almost...

The music video as it was known in its heyday is now all but dead, reborn as online videos that roam the halls of YouTube and Tidal Exclusives. At their peak, however, they were incredibly effective short films-cum-advertisements, selling records and concert tours. Eventually, Hollywood realized...

From the moment the project was announced, the easy conclusion to jump to was that The Shape of Water was Guillermo del Toro’s sneaky way of making a spin-off about Abe Sapien, the amphibious man played by Doug Jones in both of del Toro’s Hellboy movies. That turned out not to be the case, but...

With the premiere of the Paramount Network’s Waco miniseries alongside continued controversy over Quentin Tarantino’s upcoming Manson-era film, there’s never been a better time to revisit the allure of the cult. But where real-life leaders like Jim Jones, Charles Manson, and David Koresh saw...