Few films can compete with the longevity of King Kong. The film is as popular today, on television and in revival theaters, as it first was in its initial release in 1933. Ironically, the film's contemporary setting of 1933 has now made it a period piece, though the ideas and themes have never aged.

The story was conceived by producer/director Merian C. Cooper and inspired by his trips to Africa and Southeast Asia to shoot documentary films. Cooper imagined setting a primitive giant ape against the civilization of a modern New York City. This vision was eventually realized on the screen with the aid and collaboration of special visual effects artist and innovator, Willis H. O'Brien.

The special visual techniques developed for King Kong were numerous. One of the more important technical advances was the development of a safe (cellulose-acetate) rear-projection screen by Sidney Saunders. Although earlier films had used a more primitive glass rear-projection screen (which, if accidently broken, could cause serious injuries to actors and crew), the cellulose-acetate screen allowed King Kong to be the first film to use large-scale rear projection. Another innovation was the invention and use of the optical printer by Vernon Walker and Linwood Dunn. The optical printer presented a new way of combining optical mattes that was superior to the old, and more complex, Dunning process. The enormous amount of matte work in the film (used to combine the special effects with the live action) would not have been feasible without the help of the printer.

Although stop-motion animation had been used previously in other films (such as O'Brien's The Lost World in 1925), King Kong was the first feature film to use stop-motion to create a continuous character. The model of King Kong was

An interesting switch-a-roo this weekend; Disney’s Tangled, second to the boy wizard last week, turned the tables this weekend, earning $21.5 million at the box office. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 fell to second with $16.7 million, but with $244.2 million already in the bank, it’s not all tears at Hogwarts. This is Tangled’s second week at the box office,

Ingmar Bergman has said that he made Fanny and Alexander (Fanny och Alexander) as his final film. It is an ingratiating and expansive film, ultimately a festive comedy, with its bleakest moments embedded between two extended family celebrations, the Christmas during which the father of Fanny and Alexander dies, and the christenings of the sister their mother had from her second husband and

First meet Jamie Randall, a smooth-talking prescription drug salesman with a reputation for womanizing; then meet Maggie Murdoch, a fiery passionate photographer who eventually changes the formerly mentioned Randall's womanizing ways. If this storyline sounds familiar, throw in a chronic illness in young Maggie, several ounces of flesh, and a retro 1990s timestamp, and now we've got ourselves a movie that is worth

"More than any picture before it, it made moviegoing a middle class activity," writes Joan L. Silverman of The Birth of a Nation (French, ed., The South in Film). "Soon movie palaces were built in fashionable neighborhoods all over the United States." More than that, the film remains one of the most controversial of the medium's first century. The National Association for the

Partisans of America's Broadway stage, the "fabulous invalid" of 1920s, when pessimists feared that talking pictures would lure new generations away from live theatre, were greatly heartened when after the early successes of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie (1945), and Arthur Miller's All My Sons (1947), the promising newcomers followed up their success with A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Death of a

Otto e mezzo (8½) achieved its rather distinctive appellation as a result of its location within a Fellini canon which up to that point included seven films and two short pieces that the director had contributed to a pair of Italian anthology films. Given this personal linkage with its director and the film's apparent theme—one not unrelated to a case history of male

The fight between two fantasy heavyweights was brutal, but Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Part 1) came out on top for the second week in a row, earning $76.2 million at the box office over the five-day Thanksgiving weekend. Coming in second, Disney's well-received remake of the Rapunzel tale Tangled wasn't any slouch, drawing $69 million. Megamind continues its drop off, but

According to Deems Taylor, writing in 1940 (although the story was later denied by Disney sources), Fantasia first began as a comeback vehicle for Mickey Mouse after the Disney Studio had turned from modest cartoon production to large-scale animation features. Certainly Disney had used the Silly Symphony format to introduce additional cartoon figures – Pluto in 1930, the Three Pigs in 1933, and

One of the more obscure graphic novels to join the film adaptation fray this year is the English comedy Tamara Drewe. Originating in 2005 in the weekly pages of The Guardian newspaper in the U.K and primarily based on the classic British novel Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy, the author's epic romantic tapestry has been retooled as a country manner