-
One Room Country Shack: Quentin Tarantino Unleashes The Hateful Eight
Some movies come with a colorful history, meaning that their road to the big screen has been rather unusual. One of those is Quentin Tarantino‘s The Hateful Eight. Originally designed as a follow-up to the successful Django Unchained, the director temporarily scrapped the whole project because a first draft of the screenplay had been leaked […]
-
Ghost in the Machine: Daniel Craig’s James Bond Hunts Sam Mendes’s Spectre
‘James Bond will return…’ Barring a short period in the early 1990s, when the future of the series was up in the air thanks to legal issues, this statement has been as sure as death and taxes for more than five solid decades. Three years after the gargantuan success of Skyfall, the British super spy […]
-
Cheap Sunglasses: Roddy Piper Fights the Aliens in John Carpenter’s They Live
‘Rowdy’ Roddy Piper was arguably one of wrestling’s first true major superstars in the late 1980s. When the Canadian fought Hulk Hogan at the then-WWF’s initial Wrestlemania, his popularity almost rivaled that of the blond, mustache-wearing ‘Hulkster.’ These two men were also pioneers in terms of turning their fame in the ring into carving out […]
-
Home by the Sea: Ray Milland Welcomes The Uninvited
Horror films were popular in the United States in the 1940s, in spite of the Second World War and the feel-good stories Hollywood brought to the silver screen to distract the people. Russian-born writer and producer Val Lewton, in particular, managed to attract a cult following with masterful B-movies such as Cat People, I Walked […]
-
Back in the U.S.S.R.: William Hurt Investigates Soviet-Style in Michael Apted’s Gorky Park
For half of a century, the Soviet Union was the one big enemy of all Western countries as well as a welcome antagonist in a myriad of books, movies, and television shows. Portraits of the socialist empire were usually fairly one-sided and sketchy. It was the time of the Cold War, after all, and the […]
-
Basket Case: James Stewart Defends Ben Gazzara in Otto Preminger’s Anatomy Of A Murder
James ‘Jimmy’ Stewart is one of Hollywood’s most beloved actors of all time. His noteworthy movies range from an Oscar-winning performance in Frank Capra’s The Philadelphia Story to becoming an Alfred Hitchcock’s favorite in Rear Window and Vertigo. After ‘Hitch’ had infamously ditched him for Cary Grant on North By Northwest, James Stewart managed to […]
-
Devils & Dust: The Corruption of Nicolas Cage in John Dahl’s Red Rock West
Remember when Nicolas Cage was one of the more respected actors of the Hollywood family? It may appear like eons ago, but in the 1990s, he had a remarkable run of movies that worked and increased his reputation. Nicolas Cage couldn’t do any wrong – or so it seemed. He had the male starring role […]
-
A Little Bit of Finger: Chicken and Other Assorted Goodies in The Bone Man
Austrian films have been the secret stars of the German-speaking landscape in recent years, not just because of the eccentric Michael Haneke and his Oscar-winning drama Amour. In artistic terms, many of these usually indie pictures have outperformed the more expensive productions from the bigger neighboring country. Lately, one of the mainstays of Austrian cinema […]
-
The Millionaire Waltz: Rekindling the ‘Roaring Twenties’ in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby
With his leading role in Baz Luhrmann’s modern version of Romeo & Juliet, Leonardo DiCaprio burst onto the Hollywood scene in grand style in 1996. So when the news spread that the charismatic superstar and the director of the Oscar-winning musical Moulin Rouge! would reunite for an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel The […]
-
Private Investigations: The Birth of the Hard-boiled Detective in John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon
Nowadays, devious investigators must be considered an integral part of the Hollywood repertoire. That wasn’t always the case. Their archetype is a guy named Sam Spade, who first appeared on the big screen in 1941. At the time, the character created by writer Dashiell Hammett had already been immensely popular as the hero of the […]
-
Through the Looking-Glass: Why Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver Remains an Important Movie
Movies in which persons stare at themselves in the mirror or talk to themselves are a dime a dozen in the world of today. Yet there aren’t too many iconic characters in modern Hollywood, or in contemporary cinema in general, especially not too many polarizing figures inspired by real life. Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle, […]
-
The Loop Closes: Time Travelling in Style in Rian Johnson’s Looper
Time travels are nothing too unusual in cinema. We’ve seen it in several Star Trek movies and in the Back To The Future trilogy, amongst many others. Meeting one’s own younger or older self always poses a lot of difficulties for the heroes of these movies, as even the slightest change in the past may […]
-
Holy Water: The Sinister Los Angeles of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown
If you thought film noir was long dead and gone, think twice. The genre – if you can even call it that – has never vanished from the landscape. The rumors about its demise have been largely exaggerated – for the simple reason that there have been many noteworthy classics since the heyday of film […]
-
Eyes of a Stranger: Voyeurism and Horror in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom
Norman Bates from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is universally regarded as the quintessential movie psychopath. Nowadays, he’s simply an indispensable member of the greatest onscreen characters of all time. Psycho’s importance becomes obvious when we consider that its filming is about to become the topic of a feature called Hitchcock by Sacha Gervasi with Anthony Hopkins, […]