Two genre masterpieces were released on the same day in the summer of 1982, both exploring a world in which hard-boiled blue-collar characters struggle to survive in an oppressive, inhospitable landscape, hunted by beings that only appear to be human. One of these films — John Carpenter’s The...

This weekend will see a lot of people saying aloud or to themselves, “They remade Flatliners?” That same question will resurface in a few months when it’s released on home video, and then the film will most likely never be spoken of again. While it should eventually recoup its low $20 million...

While David Cronenberg has been synonymous with “body horror” for most of his career, it has been close to two decades since he made a feature (1999’s eXistenZ) that could be classified as such. (It’s also been that long since he directed one based on his own script.) In that time, his...

“It seems like everybody loves Harry Dean!” So said David Lynch last October, as he presented the Vidiots Foundation’s inaugural Harry Dean Stanton Award to the man himself. Lynch was one of dozens of luminaries from the film and music world — including Anjelica and Danny Huston, Kris...

You may not have noticed that there’s been very little buzz online about the 20th anniversary of Spaceman. That’s because you probably have no idea that Spaceman exists. It’s all right, though. Hardly anyone does. But perhaps they should. A little background for the uninitiated, which in...

In 1991, Susan Faludi published her landmark text, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, which argued that the 1980s saw the media perpetuate a series of myths and falsehoods in order to scare women against the strides they’d made during the feminist revolution of the 1970s. A...

Earlier this year, critics and fanboys the world over hailed James Mangold’s Logan as one of the great comic book films. A dark, violent look at a hero’s last days in a world that has forgotten him, Logan does for superhero movies what Unforgiven did for Westerns — it may be the dawn of a new...

“Anything in particular you lookin’ for?” The old woman in the lawn chair asked with more exasperation than curiosity. I stood over a box of plastic clamshell VHS cases, the kind usually reserved for Disney movies, the kind that makes a primally satisfying pop when opened, and lied. ...

Twin Peaks: The Return managed to both exceed and confound its viewers’ expectations. This feat is doubly impressive considering how little was known about the plot or structure of the show before it aired beyond Showtime CEO David Nevins’ description of it as “an emotional story about...

This month marks the 30th anniversary of John Sayles’s Matewan, an American classic that fell through the cracks upon release and remains criminally under-seen to this day. The film details the events leading up to 1920 Battle of Matewan (alternatively known as the Matewan Massacre) in West...

“No pointy hats, but plenty of pointy heads.” That’s how the jaded FBI man played by Gene Hackman sums up the Jessup County chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning. Sure enough, the Klansmen in the 1988 film eschew the organization’s traditional robes, although...

The three most popular professions in cinema, based on the frequency with which they appear in movies, are writers, hitmen, and gaffers. (It’s true, so you don’t need to bother looking it up.) Hitman films in particular are a staple both in Hollywood and abroad, and this week sees yet another...

In 1957, European immigrant Frederick Kohner published the novel Gidget, The Little Girl with Big Ideas, about a girl who aspires to be a surfer. Kohner got the idea after watching his daughter, a budding feminist, declare her desire to engage in a “boys-only sport.” Two years later, Hollywood...

When it was announced that Quentin Tarantino’s next film would involve the Manson Family murders, the news was met with excitement, outrage, trepidation, and — most curiously — surprise.    First of all, you would think that after a quarter-century of following his singular career, people...

Boy, that stunt/elaborate suicide attempt in the latest Tom Cruise blockbuster looks like a time and a half. I didn’t name which one because I want this article to work until at least 2030, maybe 2040. These days, Tom Cruise hasn’t just become synonymous with actors doing their own stunts,...