Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, which has won wide and continued acceptance from the time of its release, has come to be considered one of the screen's great masterpieces of black comedy. Yet Kubrick had originally planned the film as a serious adaptation of Peter George's Red Alert, a novel concerned ...Read more

To speak of Arthur Penn is to address the question of what might be termed, somewhat paradoxically, the "post-classical" American cinema. On the one hand Penn belongs with that group of post-World War II directors which came to cinema from the stage and from the early days of television – ...Read more

The weekend box office opened early this weekend, with Wednesday openers rounding out the top spots. Ben Stiller and Robert De Niro brought in a healthy $48.3 million in the five-day opener of Little Fockers to claim first place, with $34 million over the 3-day weekend; reviews, however, are not ...Read more

Pandora's Box brings to mind familiar questions about film-as art—whether the art arises from the director's work, from the performances, from the editor's decisions, or from a combination of all these elements. Pandora's Box might well be an unremarkable film without the magnificent presence of Louise Brooks, but then again, ...Read more

At the end of 2010, with royal watchers going mad about the engagement of William and Kate, a movie about William's great grandfather seems timely. And Colin Firth watchers are certainly swirling around the possibilities that his portrayal of King George VI in The King's Speech could make this, the ...Read more

I think the current trend in Hollywood is that if you don't have an original idea for a movie, either remake an old movie or reinterpret a literary classic. The well must have been pretty dry because not only do we get a modern Gulliver's Travels, but we get to ...Read more

The halo surrounding the accolade "film classic" can weigh heavily, indeed, and few films have encountered the extremes of opinion as has Frank Capra's classic, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. It has been considered a most profound American tragedy. It has also been called sheer cornball on celluloid, even a ...Read more

For the sake of full transparency, I want to start this review by revealing that I've never seen the John Wayne version of True Grit nor have I read the novel by Charles Portis. I've come to the Coen Brothers take on True Grit with a completely open mind, and ...Read more

As he set out to plan Apocalypse Now filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola ranked as one of the most important young talents then working in Hollywood. His two Godfather films (1972, 1974) had landed on the list of the most profitable in Hollywood history, while The Conversation (1974) had been hailed ...Read more

Tron: Legacy is not a reboot or a re-envisioning of the cult sci-fi classic Tron. Rather it's a retooled and amped up version of the same. Ultimately, there's nothing new here. The story follows the template set up in the first one. Hero has problem in the real world. Hero ...Read more