Nowadays, when the name “Nicolas Cage” graces a movie poster, it usually means the viewing audience will be in for a bit of wide-eyed screaming, stuff blowing up, and maybe a scene of Cage sending a woman flying into a wall for reasons no one can adequately explain. Well, in a bit of a disappointment, Season of the Witch features Cage screaming very little, but lots of stuff blows up, and in a surprising move tries to top his achievement in 2006’s Wicker Man by throwing a woman even further across a room. To be fair, she was actually choking someone at the time, but I digress.... If you haven’t guessed by now, Season of the Witch is B-grade schlock. But oddly enough, it’s fairly smart schlock, and weaves enough into the plot to actually keep you guessing as to what’s really going on, even when you think you’ve got it all figured out.

Behman and Felson (Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman, respectively) are two knights who have spent the better part of the early 14th century slaughtering whoever happens to look at them funny in battle after battle of the Crusades (replete with slow-motion swords to the face and Lord of the Rings-style “whoever kills more buys the drinks” banter). This is all well and good until Behman has a change of heart when his 6,981st kill happens to be an innocent woman. He and Felson decide to desert, having lost faith in the Church, only to be caught by the authorities at the first town in which they stop. Naturally, their reputation precedes them, and the local Cardinal (an almost unrecognizable Christopher Lee) asks them to do a favor. It seems a mysterious girl (Claire Foy) has been traveling from town to town, and everywhere she stays there’s an outbreak of the plague.

A pet project of Darryl Zanuck's, The Grapes of Wrath exercised the packaging talents of Fox's studio head for a large part of 1939 as he put together a team appropriate to a book with the stature of Steinbeck's novel. John Ford was an obvious choice to direct, Dudley Nichols to write the script, and Henry Fonda to star as Tom Joad, the

Country Strong is, in a nutshell, the story about the high price of fame that singer Kelly Canter (Gwyneth Paltrow) must pay for her country music superstardom. The film chronicles Kelly's life on tour after a brief stint in rehab (clichéd, yet somehow appropriate for the times) for alcohol abuse. She is talented, yet trapped in a life that she doesn't want. A

The Maltese Falcon opens with credits appearing over the falcon statue, which casts a shadow into the depth of the frame. There follows a printed commentary, over the image, about the falcon's history. A shot of San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge, establishes location, and we move to the Spade and Archer sign on the window of their office. The shadow letters "Spade

Martin Scorsese's telling of the story of Jake La Motta, Raging Bull, has given rise to a number of different, often conflicting, readings. For Scorsese himself, La Motta's trajectory from promising boxer to middleweight champion of the world to night-club performer is the story of "a guy attaining something and losing everything, and then redeeming himself." Such a reading is clearly reinforced by

Hiroshima mon amour was the first feature directed by Alain Resnais. Besides establishing the director's international reputation, the film was one of several released in 1959 signalling the emergence of a new generation of French filmmakers working in a modernist narrative vein. Indeed, the film is considered something of a landmark in the history of modernist cinema. The film is also seen as

In itself, E.T. would hardly concern us; if not entirely negligible (it manifests certain skills, and contains a few memorable turns of dialogue, such as the question of how one explains "school" to a "higher intelligence"), it has no greater claim on the attention than countless other minor Hollywood movies. It does demand consideration as a cultural phenomenon: not merely the film itself

The calendar may have changed, but the results are still the same: the top three champions from last week reign in the same spots they did the week before. Little Fockers came in 1st with $26.3 million, bringing it over $100 million total in its second week. True Grit showed few signs of slowing down as well, staying put in the second spot

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 with the demented General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) and his decision to

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 – people like Nicholas Ray, Sam Peckinpah, Franklin Schaffner, Martin Ritt, and Joseph Losey.