No one could ever mistake a Jay Ward cartoon for being serious, not that they pandered to the preschool cheap seats either. Oh yes, The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, The Dudley Do-Right Show, and George of the Jungle had animated safes falling on animated heads and enough puns to violate the Geneva...

The only time I actually met Albert Finney, I was wearing an enormous cartwheel hat and chalk-white face paint and he was being propositioned by a stripper. Full disclosure, we were on the set of the period film Washington Square (1997); it was my first time working on a movie. I’d bluffed my...

How could anyone even suggest making a sequel to The Fly? David Cronenberg’s 1986 sci-fi/horror remake of the 1958 classic is a stone-cold masterpiece. It’s arguably the greatest horror film of the ‘80s and the director’s personal best cinematic offering. When The Fly II hit theaters on...

On the whole, movie trailers haven’t had narrators for over a decade. They’ve been replaced by overbearing musical scores, ominous cover versions of pop songs, or some combination of the two, along with snippets of dialogue from the movie’s characters. Just a few decades ago, however, the...

Ring rubber bells, beat cotton gongs, strike silken cymbals, play leathern flutes. The cats and cans and you and I and all such things with souls, We shall hear: “Walter Paisley is born.” And the souls become flesh. Walter Paisley is born! Gremlins This is how Walter Paisley, the...

Indie jack-of-all-trades Mark Duplass’ roots in the mumblecore film movement have given him a strong base for understanding how to capture the ups and downs of human relationships. His writing on films such as The Puffy Chair (2005), Jeff, Who Lives at Home (2011), and Blue Jay (2016) all focus...

For the second year, Turner Classic Movies’ weekly trip to Noir Alley – hosted by Eddie Muller, founder and president of the Film Noir Foundation – is taking February off for the channel’s “31 Days of Oscar,” when all it airs are films that won or were nominated for Academy Awards. But...

When actor Bob Balaban was gathering a crew for his directorial debut, Parents, a would-be applicant walked in and said, “I don’t really want to do this with you, I just came in to tell you you’re evil.”  That’s great press for any horror movie, but especially for the first feature...

For most viewers, cult director John Waters' movies are synonymous with transvestism, “bad taste” humor, and toxic American kitsch. But the Baltimore auteur has explored various political, sociological, and psychological themes in his movies over the course of his half-century career (his first...

1999 is considered one of the strongest years of cinema in living memory. There will no doubt be countless articles in 2019 marking the 20th anniversaries of that year's greatest hits and examining their impact and legacy. But this column isn’t about those movies. This column is about the...

The usual disclaimers apply: I didn't see every movie, I'm an idiot who doesn't know what he's talking about, etc. I note that four of the 10 were directed by women, and nine of them were "festival movies," premiering at Toronto, Sundance, or Telluride. There were a lot of excellent movies in 2018,...

The final moments of Wildlife and A Star is Born involve an acknowledgment of the camera. In Wildlife, that moment is an arranged family photo that pays tribute to a non-existent family. In A Star Is Born, it’s a moment of grief and star-making, one in which something old is destroyed so that...

Based on my own research. Films included only if they played theatrically. Corrections and additions are welcome (@ me). For comparison's sake, here's the 2017 edition.   Total wide releases (600+ theaters): 160 Sequels, prequels, remakes, reboots, and...

Jason Reitman is never as good as when he’s collaborating with screenwriter Diablo Cody; bonus points if the film in question stars Charlize Theron, as Tully does. This unexpectedly searing film alternates between tender drama and psychological terror, plumbing the depths of an exhausted...

If you’ve heard anything about Xavier Legrand’s Custody — admittedly, it’s possible you haven’t — it’s likely writer/director Xavier Legrand's elevator pitch that his film “starts like Kramer vs. Kramer and ends like The Shining.” The logline can be taken quite literally, as the...