Few filmmakers can take a whistle-blowing dramatization of real life potentially dusty legal shenanigans and news gathering and make it so chest convulsively taut the…
Few films permeate the gestalt consciousness like Star Wars (“I am your father”, “Use the Force” and so on) but in recent times The Matrix…
In October 2005, shortly after his groundbreaking and seemingly stand-alone Batman Begins was completed, writer/director/producer Christopher Nolan ruminated. “You know, I am thinking about another…
Scorsese’s Raging Bull is not your dad’s boxing movie. It’s certainly not a story of conventional redemption or hope overcoming the odds. Instead it’s mainly…
Screenwriter David Mamet came up with a Stanislavski quote to describe The Untouchables: “Tragedy is just heightened melodrama.” Brian De Palma, director of The Untouchables,…
Michael Mann’s 2006 big screen revamp of 1980s groundbreaking TV show Miami Vice (Brandon Tartikoff, NBC’s entertainment president scribbled “MTV cops” on a cocktail napkin;…
During the making of Ride the High Country in 1962, director Sam Peckinpah was ordered by MGM to stop filming on location (Mammoth Lakes, near…
As far back as I can remember, director Martin Scorsese has been synonymous with wiseguys, mooks, goombahs, and spin-on-a-dime funny-how guys delivering a gut punch…
There are things we say to strangers, there are things we say to family and friends, and, finally, there are things we say, privately, to…
Paul Thomas Anderson’s debut film Hard Eight (working title Sydney, preferred by Anderson, thwarted by his backers) arose from the performance of a veteran actor…