With all its poignant elements — a World War II setting, a quaint seaside town, a long-lost love, a child who changes an adult’s life for the better, and on and on — Summerland should be a sticky sweet English confection, gooey and topped with treacle. However, in her feature debut,...

Like The Stepford Wives, I’d avoided the original Rollerball due to a flaw over which it had no responsibility: spawning an unapologetically terrible remake. So, like Stepford, its recent appearance on Amazon Prime prompted an overdue first watch for Norman Jewison’s futuristic sports drama,...

Harry Palmer’s personal file reads like a permanent record: “Insubordinate, insolent, a trickster...perhaps with criminal tendencies.” When his new boss, another stiff-upper-lip with a patriotic apathy for human life, reads it back to him, Palmer cocks a proper Jack-the-Lad grin and admits,...

Though box office bombs come and go, some live on in infamy. Kevin Reynolds’ post-apocalyptic action flick Waterworld holds the usual traits of other bombs — big stars, questionable creative decisions and performances — except pitched to eleven. Conceptually based upon the catastrophic...

I grew up in the Rotten.com days. For the morbid adolescent, crime scene photos and grisly images of freak accidents were a click away. Now defunct, the site traded in the bizarre, lifting the beaded curtain to that shadowy forbidden room at the video store-- though  the treasures to be found...

Being a teenager in the early 2000s was its own brand of confusion. Right at the beginning of the digital age, we were only just starting to have discussions about privacy and online identity. Chatrooms, GeoCities sites, and AOL Instant Messenger exposed us to new ideas and questions, with very...

The life of Marie Curie is one of incredible accomplishment, adversity, and loss. Her legacy is likewise complicated, as her discoveries of polonium, radium, and radioactivity led to innovations life-saving (cancer treatments) and world-rattlingly destructive (the atom bomb). To capture all this...

There are a couple of movies going on in The Rental, both of them starring people that, as both a moviegoer and a person, I really don’t wanna deal with right now. It starts off by introducing two people, Charlie (Dan Stevens) and Mina (Sheila Vand), looking at a cliffside rental property...

One of the most excruciating and heartbreaking aspects to Bruce Lee’s death in 1973 – beyond his tender age (32) and the family he left behind – was the cruelty of its timing. He died on July 20th of that year; a mere six days later Enter the Dragon, his first American studio vehicle and the...

In the forty years since the release of Brian De Palma’s ​Dressed to Kill​, the conversation has shifted from the controversy at the time over his treatment of women to the film’s transphobic twist—that the killer is a trans woman. When the Criterion Collection added the film in 2015,...

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...

War movies tend to fall into two camps. There are the ones like 1917, Dunkirk, or Saving Private Ryan that focus on the mental and emotional impact of battle on those fighting it, and there are ones more concerned with the technical and strategic aspects of the events depicted, like Tora! Tora!...

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...

With theatrical releases hitting major obstacles, this summer has brought some truly incredible movies to digital/streaming/VOD.  Sadly, The Sunlit Night is not among them.  At first glance, this dramedy looks promising. It boasts quirky and charismatic stars like Jenny Slate, Zach...