Retrospectives

It’s hard to imagine a movie that has more 90s hip-hop nostalgia than Juice. It was the golden age for movies like it, with Boyz n the Hood in 1991 and Menace II Society in…

I had a choice between writing a retrospective on David Lynch’s haunting Lost Highway, or this embarrassing 1992 comedy starring Sylvester Stallone and Estelle Getty. Every reasonable cineaste would naturally choose the former. One movie…

JFK has its share of flaws. Director Oliver Stone, a Vietnam veteran, displays his strong disdain for the government throughout the film. Blinded by this, some of the information included in the film is incorrect and some…

I’m probably writing this article prematurely. On my reading list, I have somewhere — beneath hundreds of other books I promised myself I would read one day — Kevin Farley’s supposedly touching memoir about his…

Movies have always been an important part of my life; from my first (traumatic) cinema experience, to a present where I write about movies, and yap about them on YouTube. However, in the later 1990s-very…

Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) got the ending that Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) deserved in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. After years of the government bouncing her around and facing discrimination and violence, she deserved to be…

In 1999, the film industry underwent a seismic shift that would change cinema forever when Lana and Lilly Wachowski released The Matrix. The film was an immediate cultural phenomenon and proved to be a massive…

We’ve mentioned the Mission: Impossible franchise before in the context of anniversaries. Back in the days when the franchise was hopping from director to director with big stylistic changes from entry to entry. While they…

Ralph Fiennes excels at playing villains, even when he isn’t necessarily trying to. The English Patient is a good example of this. Even though Laszlo de Almásy (Fiennes) is our main character that we should sympathize with,…

Cape Fear is a Hitchcock film without Hitchcock. Who better to make it than Martin Scorcese, the master of all things bloody and dark? It’s the kind of film that theaters were made for. Cape Fear is…

In 1953, a new play premiered. Written by the legendary playwright Arthur Miller, The Crucible is loosely based on the Salem Witch Trials. Though the narrative is based on historical events, Miller was indirectly talking…

Thirty years ago we were treated to Wes Craven’s deliriously entertaining socially-conscious horror roller coaster, The People Under the Stairs. When we talk about Craven’s oeuvre, the usual suspects are mentioned: the exploitation classic, The…

I was introduced to How Green Was My Valley through Frasier (and no one was surprised). There’s an episode where Frasier goes to several different video rental stores just to find this one movie — How Green Was My Valley.…

When someone dons multiple hats on a production (such as starring, directing, and/or writing), the results can vary greatly. Yes, there are times when everything falls into place, and we end up with Citizen Kane,…

My Own Private Idaho is weird to watch for the first time. I don’t know what I was expecting, but a group of young male prostitutes with Shakespearean vernacular was not it. All I knew about…

I’d never seen Training Day before this past week and so I had the idea in my head that Denzel Washington’s character, Alonzo, was the hero of our story. He was rough around the edges and a…

Ten years ago saw the release of remakes of The Thing and Footloose (Prequel, shmequel, you know damn well the 2011 The Thing is a remake really, but we’ll come back to that). Footloose made $63 million…

Along with the highly-anticipated release of Halloween Kills, comes the desire to revisit past films in the franchise. Coincidentally, Halloween II, one of the best chapters in the Michael Myers lore, turns 40 this month. Kind…

Andrzej Zulawski’s 1981 horror film Possession has been a particularly difficult film to view legally in the United States. For this reason, it has been on my radar for literal years as a film I have heard…

You never really know what you’re in for when you watch Drive. You think it’s a movie about crime, then it becomes a slow-burning journey of self-discovery, then it’s a romance, then it’s back to a crime…

It’s only fitting that New York City‘s biggest film festival has chosen to premiere Cohen Film Collection’s new 4K restoration of Joan Micklin Silver’s Hester Street — a film so obviously tied to the city’s legacy…

Warrior is a dramatic look at the world of MMA, as seen through the eyes of two brothers with a complicated relationship. While this is a sports movie primarily about fighting, much of Warrior is dedicated to…

Every so often, the “What was the first movie you saw on the big screen?” topic comes up. For most people, the answer is something like Bambi, or E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (incidentally, the second film I…

Tin Cup is unique. It’s about a sport that I would wager most people find pretty uneventful. It’s a comedy, but it isn’t slapstick like Caddyshack or The Longest Yard. Most of all, our hero doesn’t win in the end;…

I’ll admit that I’m not the foremost scholar when it comes to racism. I’m a white girl from the Intermountain West who grew up in a predominantly white world. But, I think it’s important to…

This month marked ten years since one of the last decades’ most beloved characters first swung onto the big screen. In Rise of the Planet of the Apes we saw the birth of Andy Serkis’…

When reading about Cowboys & Aliens, you would think it was perhaps one of the most ridiculous movies made in 2011. Then again, watching it may make you think that, too. Yet, it’s one of…

Kazaam is much like a cheese — it had the potential to age well, but someone kept it in their prewar apartment cupboard at a constant temperature of 80 degrees and now it just reeks.…

When considering whether to accept a job or not, one of the factors is the work-life balance. In an ideal world, we would be able to leave at the same time every day and have…

Cars 2 is a cute little family-friendly movie that you can watch with your kids, right? WRONG. Cars 2 is the most violent, intense, and bizarre movie I have ever seen that is still entirely made for…