The Outsiders is one of the few — possibly the only — entries in Francis Ford Coppola’s oeuvre that is widely considered a cult classic…
“You know what’s wrong with America, don’t you? It’s the light,” Hank rants to his buddy. “It’s all tinsel, it’s all phony bullshit, man. Nothing’s…
Once upon a time, the great François Truffaut said, “There’s no such thing as an anti-war film.” The details of when he said this, and…
Who’s a Fredo? The Godfather Part II Against the New Right 1. In what amounts to the coda of The Godfather Part II, the final…
There are three kinds of transportation that dominate cinema: the horse, the car, and the train. Each of these has its romance and its landscape.…
Is there anything new to say about The Godfather? This might have been a worthwhile question even very shortly after it came out. The recent…
“They said, ‘Take the money while it is being offered, and then you go make your own personal movie.’ And there’s a lot of sense…
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…