Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell burst onto the screen in a flash of color, sparkle, and song. With no exposition, or even opening credits, the…
Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950) would be Otto Preminger’s last film for 20th Century Fox, capping off a productive (if tumultuous) chapter in the director’s…
Pop quiz, hotshot: if a city bus is rigged with explosives and speeding down the highway at 50mph, what is the probability that Keanu Reeves…
The inimitable internal torments of David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers are colored in bloody red and sterile chrome, starting with the melancholy anatomical figures and pointed…
There’s a contradiction at the heart of James Cameron’s work, and the reason he’s such a quintessential Hollywood figure is because of, not despite, that…
If the arc of the moral universe indeed bends toward justice, then there just might have been a sliver of proof in the sold-out screening…
In 1968, Richard Fleischer democratized the participants of the crime procedural with The Boston Strangler, spearheading a new school of form as applied to the…
As the one-dimensional cartoon Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang) tells his new recruits, “You’re not in Kansas anymore. You are on Pandora,” James Cameron is writing…
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…
On the set of 1946’s Duel in the Sun, King Vidor was constantly assailed by a positively megalomaniacal David O. Selznick, who extrapolated new subplots…
Walter Hill famously bristled at his film Southern Comfort being referred to as a Vietnam allegory; such denial has had him labeled as inexplicably stubborn,…
Episode Description: This week, prepare yourself for a super-sized episode as we discuss Tom Green’s divisive 2001 comedy Freddy Got Fingered. Marvel as two grown…
Episode Description: This week, nuclear war meets teen comedy as we take on 1986’s ill-conceived The Manhattan Project, directed by Marshall Brickman. Christopher Collet stars…
The summer of 1996 saw the release of three huge blockbusters that would in one way or another influence the next 20 odd years of…
…Casablanca is not just one film. It is many films, an anthology. Made haphazardly, it probably made itself, if not actually against the will of its…
Though he didn’t invent it, James Mangold so perfected the Hollywood biopic/true story template with Walk the Line that they made a beat-for-beat parody of…
Another in a long line of action comedies made by people who can’t shoot action, Michael Dowse’s Stuber is frequently funny and buoyed by two…
“This is the feverish, painful expression of a man who lives in mortal fear of his own mediocrity,” concludes Dave Kehr’s negative Chicago Reader review…
After celebrated prestige pictures like Shame and 12 Years a Slave, you’d be forgiven for expecting something less disreputable from Steve McQueen than Widows. But McQueen’s normal tendencies…
The stripped-down premise and formal exactitude of John McTiernan’s 1987 Predator are precisely not present in Shane Black’s The Predator, the latest attempt to drag-out and elaborate on a…
Did you like the first Deadpool? Its constant allegedly clever meta-references? The look-how-edgy-this-is shock humor? The graphic violence? Deadpool 2 has more of those things, so…