Dying before he was sixty seemed like a fitting final action for the maverick film-maker Sam Peckinpah. Better to burn out than fade away and all that. For whenever Sam was in town the rage-filled stories of excess flew thick and fast, tales that included wild on-set bust-ups, legendary alcohol and coke consumption, budget blowouts,…

1 hour 45 minutes, Rated R for autopsies, surgeries, weird groping of internal organs Fair Value of Crimes of the Future: $8.00. It sounds strange to call this the most essential and the most inessential of David Cronenberg’s films, but here goes it is the best Cronenburg primer, the best introduction to ‘here are the…

“Lightyear” – That’s why Andy wanted a Buzz Lightyear doll? As I usually do for animated flicks, I interviewed my now ten-year old son to talk about the movie. In hindsight, I definitely should have done this before he played in a three-day baseball tournament and forgot half the movie. Stick around at the end…

“Nice isn’t it? To see a bit of color.” So says Kelly (Stanley) as she looks at the green fields through a train window on the way from London to the seaside. It’s a banal observation and yet so telling. There is no color in Kelly’s life. No joy, no hope, no normality. Every day…

Men behaving badly is the foundation of international drama. Since you need conflict, you need a motivation for bad behavior. I first learned to write in the smoky southern bars off the main college drag. I was haunted by cream-suited artistes sitting at the same booth, hunched over the same manuscript and nursing the same…

Woody Allen is a prolific artist who’s been making roughly a film a year since the late sixties. His timid yet talkative onscreen persona (simultaneously intellectual and stupid, riddled with self-doubt and wrapped up in his weedy, balding, bespectacled frame) surely places him among the most distinctive film stars of all time. It’s a double-edged…

On its surface, Little Monsters is merely a fun, visually compelling mashup of Peter Pan and Beetlejuice, as well as a movie that seriously overestimates the charms of one Howie Mandel. Beneath that surface, its intended subtext taps into common childhood anxieties about moving to a new place, fitting in, and the overwhelming dread that…

For a movie that featured busting a load in another man’s mouth as repeated punishment for (and get a load of this) resisting the idea of taking the load to begin with, The Shawshank Redemption struck me as surprisingly tame during its first hour. Though never shown, this was twice insinuated to the victimized protagonist…