You know that optical illusion where you first think you’re looking at a drawing of a vase, and then you see the inverse of the image, and it turns out is the outline of two faces staring at each other in profile (or vice-versa)? Liar—you’ve seen something like that before. Anywho, there’s a neat effect […]

Jimmy Stewart stars in a screwball comedy from 1947, alongside Jane Wyman and about a dozen faces (but not necessarily names) that will be familiar to anybody who watches a lot of movies of this vintage.  How could this go wrong? And yet, Magic Town somehow misses the mark. The movie starts out promisingly enough: […]

A lot of people are involved in the production of any movie and, in a movie like Star Wars, there’s an unusually great number of people who were extras, or played minor characters and were unrecognizable under helmets or in latex masks.  Elstree 1976 is a documentary about some of those actors, people of various […]

Second to torture porn, exorcism movies may the worst type of horror film.  Every one of them adheres, to varying degrees, to a boilerplate. Unavoidably, they always have the big exorcism as the final third.  And yet, I must find this genre a guilty pleasure because it seems I have seen every one of the […]

I’m not sure if Spielberg’s influence on 80’s films (whether directing or producing) was such a good thing.  Although he didn’t directly have a hand in 1990’s Spaced Invaders, this is a low-rent riff on many of his recurring themes, notably aliens, suburbs and kids.  There’s even a cute little robot that is befriended by […]

The comedian Andy Kaufman refused to play somebody who was drunk or stoned, dismissing it is cheap way to get laughs.  The Thin Man is a critically-revered film that I feel validates that belief.  I was shocked I could feel anything less than love for a movie with this pedigree.  The top-billed stars are William […]

My wife and I have a strong affinity with a small town in southern West Virginia named Hinton.  The town has a vintage, single-screen movie theater which we always wanted to see a movie in, except it was never showing anything we wanted to see when we were visiting the town.  Although we are not […]

This movie should have been crap.  Overwrought, sentimental, melodramatic crap. In the depression-era great plains, a con man and a nine-year-old girl he claims isn’t his daughter (but most certainly is) squabble and do various cons in an effort to get her to the girl’s only remaining known (emphasis on known) family in St. Joseph, […]

I was so done with zombies. In the 90s, I found myself a little ahead of the curve when I decided to see Dawn Of The Dead, after reading intriguing stories about the production in journalist Chet Flipo’s Everybody Was Kung-Fu Dancing.  Pretty soon, I was renting all kinds of tapes on the horror shelves […]

Did you wistfully watch Mad Men, secretly longing for the days of long rows of desks on floor after floor of entirely glass-fronted skyscrapers in New York City?  Does old advertising for, and items related to, Pan Am airlines have you despairing over the current state of air travel, which is basically a bus with […]

I’m trying to write this essay while still reeling from this movie.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say it feels like I walked away from a plane crash but, well, I’m not sure what to say right now. I went into this with zero expectations.  I didn’t even know what is was about.  […]

Isn’t it strange how there can be some wildly popular movies it just happens you have never seen?  Movies you weren’t actively trying to avoid, but they somehow always remained on the periphery of potential films to watch. For me, one of those movies was 1982’s 48 Hrs.  I was in elementary school when this […]