John Frankenheimer’s nightmarish thriller Seconds (1966) opens on John Randolph as a businessman who has lost all interest in his life and tries an experimental program which promises a new, exciting existence. When he wakes up from the first step, he discovers he’s turned into… Rock Hudson! Hudson was not Frankenheimer’s first choice—he was, in […]
“It’s not personal. It’s strictly business.” Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation of Mario Puzo’s bestseller remains the great American epic of the immigrant dream turned family business. Al Pacino stars as Michael Corleone, the clean-cut white sheep and patriotic soldier boy son of New York Godfather Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando in an Oscar–winning performance), and this […]
Dr. Moreau: What is the law? Sayer of the Law: Not to spill blood, that is the law. Are we not men? “Are we not men?” That question is at the heart of Island of Lost Souls (1932), the first adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel and (for all the changes from the novel) still […]
Talk about boldly going: Star Trek (2009)—no numbers, no subtitles, no tags—is not simply a prequel to the franchise. It’s an entire relaunch and director J.J. Abrams dares to rewrite Trek lore with an origin story that chronicles the first voyage of the Enterprise crew with a mission that sends them into a whole new Federation […]
Twin Peaks: A Limited Event Series (Paramount, Blu-ray, DVD) More than 25 years after the original Twin Peaks ended on network TV in 1990, creators David Lynch and Mark Frost were given complete freedom to produce a sequel series for Showtime. Almost every member of the original cast returned to reprise their characters (including a […]
Fences (2016) – Denzel Washington and Viola Davis earned Tony Awards for their performances in the 2010 Broadway revival of August Wilson’s play “Fences,” the story of a working class African-American family in 1950s Pittsburgh. With the blessing of Wilson’s widow (the playwright passed away in 2005), Washington brought the play to the big screen, […]
Arrival (2016) is the most cerebral of first contact films, a science fiction drama about communicating across cultures and across species and even across time without a common language, while failing to communicate within our own world. It is a film that looks out beyond our galaxy and inward to our own souls, to challenge […]
Saving Private Ryan (1998) was the first major World War II film made by Hollywood in decades and the timing was right. The 50th Anniversary of D-Day in 1994 brought the cultural conversation back to the sacrifice of American soldiers. After a generation of films revisiting Vietnam, Steven Spielberg steered Hollywood back to the pride […]
