Below you'll find a list of all posts from February, 2018
Throughout the ages, one question continues to haunt moviegoers everywhere… dogging their waking hours, haunting their sleep and likely staying with them to their graves: “BLANE instead of Duckie?!” Pretty in Pink opened today in 1985. Elsewhere, those of us — and there are quite a few — who have grown tired of Johnny Depp’s shtick over the years can …
Roman Polanski scored one of his later hits with Frantic, a brilliant little Hitchcockian number about a doctor (Harrison Ford) whose wife mysteriously vanishes on a business trip to Paris. Though not quite on the level of his very best films, it’s still a tight expertly crafted thriller with Ford delivering one of the best performances of his career. It opened …
As we get closer to the Oscars, we come smack dab against one of the comparatively few Best Picture winners that has actually stood the test of time. It Happened One Night, Frank Capra’s romp of a romantic comedy, opened today in 1934. 80+ years later, it’s just as fun, charming and utterly irresistible as it’s always been, thanks both …
Do you want the awesome first, or just the freakishly pathetic? Right, awesome it is. The Incredible Shrinking Man opened today in 1957, marking a high point of 1950s science fiction. The effects were astonishing at the time and still hold up quite well, while the script by Richard Matheson (based on his own novel) manages to fit existential questioning …
It’s another slow day, so we’re going to go with a 80s thriller that holds up reasonably well. The Hitcher stands as a case-in-point example of why you should never ever pick up a hitchhiker. Good Samaritan C. Thomas Howell stops for a guy stranded on the side of the road in the rain, only to soon realize that the guy …
A very quiet day is marked by a single notable western: How The West Was Won, following a family of settlers over the course of several generations as they journey from New York to California. It’s sumptuous and grand, as you’d expect from MGM, and was rewarded both with immense box office success and a trio of Academy Awards. The soundtrack …
Sometimes, it takes a royal jackass to stare the gibbering maw of evil in the eye and send it back to the howling pit from whence it came… even if said jackass is a barely employable stock boy with a chainsaw for a hand. Sam Raimi’s immortal Army of Darkness opened 25 years ago today in 1993.
I confess a soft spot for Clive Barker’s Nightbreed, a strange and marvelous little horror film that puts Barker’s talents for the weird and unusual on full display. A tale of beautiful monsters and evil men, it features (among other things) a surprisingly good performance from fellow horror director David Cronenberg as (what else?) a crazed serial killer. It opened today …
Stagecoach is one of those movies whose influence kind of creeps up on you. Not only did it cement a number of Western conventions that later went on to become clichés (Monument Valley settings, cavalry arriving at the last minute, etc.), but it made a star out of John Wayne and turned director John Ford into Hollywood legend. It also featured …
Because nothing says “I love you” more than serial killers who wear their victims’ skin… Before Silence of the Lambs opened, it looked shaky in the extreme. The source material — a bestselling potboiler by Thomas Harris — was terrible, Jodie Foster got the female lead only after fighting like mad for it, and Anthony Hopkins was still largely considered a stage …