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...

The first cut comes a few minutes into the second scene of Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker, and it happens so quickly that if you glance away for a second, you might not catch it. Sol Nazerman (Rod Steiger) is relaxing in the backyard of his sister’s place, and she offhandedly mentions, apropos...

Early on in Fletch Won, the eighth published novel in the series by Gregory McDonald and the first chronologically, Irwin Maurice Fletcher is reassigned to the society pages of the Los Angeles News-Tribune. “Frank, I don’t believe in society.” “That’s okay, Fletch. Society...

When the semi-annual conversation on female buddy movies resurfaces, there are usual suspects. Thelma and Louise. B.A.P.S. Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion. Steel Magnolias. One film that doesn’t show up in the conversation nearly as much as it should  is the French masterpiece Céline...

The 1990s were a strange time for filmmakers attempting to understand the Internet. As the technology went mainstream, with more families securing their own connections to the World Wide Web at home and schools adapting their curriculum to include more computer instruction, cinema responded. There...

In 1998, Stanley Kubrick accepted the D.W. Griffith Award from the Director’s Guild of America. In his acceptance speech, he compared Griffith to the Grecian myth of Icarus. Like Icarus, Griffith flew too close to the sun, but instead of his wax-and-feather wings melting, Griffith was shunned by...

When Grand Central Publishing released a new edition of the novel First Blood in 2000, author David Morrell penned an introduction, attempting to bridge the gap between the character he wrote in the early 1970s and the version of that character that had been lodged into pop consciousness by (at...

John Frankenheimer’s 1966 thriller Seconds is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel as part of their Saul Bass centennial,and his distinctive opening title sequences, and good golly Miss Molly, Saul is putting in work from frame one here. The images are smeary and distorted, disturbingly...

The Harlem-set blaxploitation movies of the 1970s – films like Super Fly, Black Caesar, and Hell Up in Harlem – share a specific verbal language, and few of its cornerstones were as recognizable as the high, wide aerial shots that typically opened them. This imagery served a specific purpose,...

The Shakespeare adaptations of the 1990s and early 2000s are unified by an excess of style, and by a series of big risks. The nightmarish bleakness of Julie Taymor’s Titus, the MTV surrealism of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, the earnest romanticism of Gil Junger’s 10 Things I Hate About...