Following a brief, but productive apprenticeship with Roger Corman, young Francis Coppola continued to explore numerous opportunities in film and theater while finishing his…
Every filmmaker has to start somewhere; for Francis Ford Coppola, like virtually the entire New Hollywood cohort that took the mainstream by storm in…
A high-angle shot of a yakuza and his girlfriend continues following the woman overhead as she crosses a street to a school swimming pool.…
Pinocchio is a fascinating late-period work from Zemeckis, one that takes in the full scope of his career as he wills us to believe in…
Like the best fiction for young children, the secret to Roald Dahl’s bibliography is its sensory qualities, that it can unlock new pathways in…
When Robert Zemeckis set about making preparations for his adaptation of Jeff Malmberg’s 2010 documentary Marwencol, he was immediately confronted with a potentially project-killing…
While not traditionally associated with the genre in the strictest sense, Robert Zemeckis has always indulged in the tropes and affects of horror even…
Despite his reputation as a mainstream hit-maker, Zemeckis has always had a wildly idiosyncratic relationship to both genre and film history. Not as obsessed…
In the 2010s, something strange happened to Robert Zemeckis: he almost became respectable again. After his trilogy of mo-cap extravaganzas, he suddenly returned to,…
After nearly a decade of directing expensive mo-cap animated films to variable box-office returns, the 2010s found Robert Zemeckis at a crossroads. The massive…
“Imagination is a force that can actually manifest a reality. Don’t put limitations on yourself. Others will do that for you.” — James Cameron…
An inconspicuous FedEx parcel starts its journey on a desolate Texas dirt road, goes “snowbound,” and ends up in post-USSR Russia a few thousand…
Robert Zemeckis filmed What Lies Beneath, a ghost story set in a modern world, while on a break from Castaway, waiting for Tom Hanks…
In the 25 years since Robert Zemeckis released Contact, the search for extraterrestrials has moved from fringe conspiracy theory to a matter of national…
“The problem with Forrest Gump is it made a billion dollars. If we’d just made a successful movie, Bob and I would have been…
No matter how many times I see it, Death Becomes Her exists first and foremost as a VHS box sitting on the cramped shelf…
Even though, to many audiences today, the eclecticism of live-action and animation may appear as a sort of a postmodernist achievement in the realm…
Cinephilia is necessarily littered with the detritus of half-remembered viewing experiences, films only glimpsed from childhood in a perspective almost wholly incompatible with the…