It’s interesting — the degree of profundity with which one interprets the word “interesting” here obviously being a “your mileage may vary” situation — that…
Following a brief, but productive apprenticeship with Roger Corman, young Francis Coppola continued to explore numerous opportunities in film and theater while finishing his master’s…
Every filmmaker has to start somewhere; for Francis Ford Coppola, like virtually the entire New Hollywood cohort that took the mainstream by storm in the…
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. The…
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 the…
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 the…
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 conundrum.…
While not traditionally associated with the genre in the strictest sense, Robert Zemeckis has always indulged in the tropes and affects of horror even outside…
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 with…
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, if…
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 critical…
“Imagination is a force that can actually manifest a reality. Don’t put limitations on yourself. Others will do that for you.” — James Cameron When…
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 miles…
Robert Zemeckis filmed What Lies Beneath, a ghost story set in a modern world, while on a break from Castaway, waiting for Tom Hanks to…
In the 25 years since Robert Zemeckis released Contact, the search for extraterrestrials has moved from fringe conspiracy theory to a matter of national security.…
“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 geniuses.…
No matter how many times I see it, Death Becomes Her exists first and foremost as a VHS box sitting on the cramped shelf of…
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 of…
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 viewer’s…
Nowadays we’re saddled with tepid action comedy stuff like The Lost City or Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard’s alleged chemistry in the Jurassics World.…
Though the vast majority of Robert Zemeckis’ films are family-friendly, it’s also easy to find cruelty and blatant sexuality in nearly all of them, the…