By the 1980s, the art of composing music for films had undergone several sea changes. The craft moved from traditional orchestration and classically trained musicians during the days of the studio system to more broad and experimental venues, with some scores created completely electronically, and...

It is strange to consider how often teen movies are about young women, and how frequently those stories are told by men. Look at the genre output from the 1980s to the 2000s, and female screenwriters are rare; female directors, even more so. Molly Ringwald was a genre princess, but her reign of...

The Nightmare on Elm Street franchise is about Freddy Krueger. With his burn scars, his tattered red and green sweater, his worn brown hat, and his knife-fingered glove, Freddy (as played by Robert Englund) has become a pop-culture icon, even for people who’ve never seen any of the Nightmare...

On May 8, 1970, the AFL-CIO mobilized some two hundred New York City construction workers and sicc’ed them on about a thousand high school and college-aged protestors who were calling out the government’s actions abroad (the invasion of Cambodia) and at home (the Kent State Massacre occurred...

The 1980s, packed full of kid-driven adventure films, has just as many beautiful disasters as it does universally beloved hits. But to be included in either category requires a film to possess some sort of a legacy, be it positive or negative., The 1985 Helen Slater vehicle The Legend of Billie...

Truffaut’s famous dictum regarding the impossibility of ever making a truly anti-war film is, usually, equally applicable to movies about cops.  Today, in the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless others at the hands of law enforcement, much of the cultural...

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,...