With a new showcase of his work on the Criterion Channel, we look at how Albert Brooks explored the possibilities of his carefully crafted comic persona.

A very unusual dispatch from a very unusual Toronto International Film Festival.

Writer/director Charlie Kaufman’s latest, the Netflix film ‘I’m Thinking of Ending Things,’ is (among other things) a thoughtful exploration of a recurring but unexamined theme in his work.

“If everybody want to stick together, I stick with ‘em. But if nobody want to stick together, I stick alone, by myself.”   -Sven Hansen In 1947, the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (because of course there was one), a political activism group that Walt...

It’s one of the most striking openings in cinema history: A burly, shirtless man in a black hood stokes a brazier, heating up a branding tool which will be used to sear the letter “S” into the flesh of accused vampire Princess Asa Vadja, who is being executed for her crimes alongside her...

You probably are not giving much thought to either The Expendables, an Avengers-style roundup of action stars with AARP cards, or Eat Pray Love, a travelogue of white feminism, as they approach their tenth anniversaries on August 13. (As you shouldn’t.) The movies have deservedly faded from...

In recent weeks and months, Hollywood’s legacy of cultural appropriation and racism has come under increased scrutiny, with the latest controversy erupting over the lack of Emmy nominations for Latinx television actors (a dialog which then morphed into a heated debate over charges of...

“That twinkle in your eye,” Clark Gable marvels at Carole Lombard in No Man of Her Own. “Wrap it up for me, will you?” It’s a moment of unguarded onscreen thirst, and watching the film now, as part of KL Studio Classics’ new “Carole Lombard Collection I,” it functions on multiple...

Few films aimed at children have made the case for the value of every life as clearly as Babe did in 1995. Yes, that Babe—the film about the pig who acted like a sheepdog, with the talking animals, and the chapter-style format mimicking the storybook upon which the film was based (The Sheep-Pig...

Few artists can plan a career for themselves, especially in the uncertain world of filmmaking. Most work has to be taken as it’s offered, which is why so many artists end up jacks of all trades. This was certainly the case with Ennio Morricone, who began his career not in films but in a variety...

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...

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...