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...

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...

On the night of September 16th, 1984, Crockett and Tubbs cruised a jet-black Ferrari Daytona convertible into pop culture immortality to the tune of Phil Collins’s “In The Air Tonight.” Miami Vice did the impossible - it took MTV seriously. Hill Street Blues veteran Anthony Yerkovich and...

Comedian Robert Klein sometimes does a bit about his role in Hooper, the stuntman movie that unsuccessfully sued The Stunt Man to be called The Stunt Man. He attended a college screening shortly after it opened and stuck around to expound on his feature-length Peter Bogdanovich impression....

When a filmmaker tells you what influenced them, believe it. Back in 2017, when Jordan Peele was making the rounds promoting his feature directorial debut Get Out, he spoke at length about the “social thrillers” that inspired it – genre films that were rooted in the issues of the moment, and...

The summer camp sex comedy is a cornerstone of 1980s cinema, and at first glance 1980’s Little Darlings looks like a minor example of the genre, without the pop-culture impact of something like the Meatballs franchise. Even the plot sounds like prime material for the parody of Wet Hot American...

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 takes a big man to admit when he’s wrong, and I’m 6’4”, so I admit that I’m wrong a lot. And I’m going to do it again, right now. A couple of years back, I wrote a book called It’s Okay With Me: Hollywood, the 1970s, and the Return of the Private Eye (PLUG), covering (as you can...

In the decade after Stonewall, gay culture exploded and thrived in ways previously unthinkable. One filmmaker who covered every facet of it – from the parades to the adult film market – was Arthur J. Bressan, Jr., who also holds the distinction of making the first dramatic feature about AIDS,...

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,...

Chantal Akerman was 25 years old when her technically groundbreaking, emotionally devastating, and alternately revered and reviled Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles played at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival. Speaking about the film in 2009, Akerman remembers the reaction: “People...

With the passing of Stuart Gordon this past March, cinema lost one of its great provocateurs. An agitator and enemy of good taste from the start of his career in the Chicago theater scene—where, during his 1968 production of The Game Show, he would lock audiences in the theater until they...