According to Shaun Considine’s 1994 biography Mad as Hell: The Life and Work of Paddy Chayefsky, the idea evolved in early 1977 when Chayefsky started working on a project about a man’s “search for his true self.” That eventually led him to write the 1980 science-fiction movie “Altered States,” directed by Ken Russell. But the … Read more
I saw “The Phantom Menace” at the now-defunct Ziegfeld movie palace in New York with my wife and my younger brother, also major fans of the series. We walked out in muted silence, then spent the next few hours trying to convince ourselves that we’d had a good time. We had to admit that, except … Read more
It’s also supposedly streaming on several subscription-based sites. Curiously, one of the platforms listed is Amazon Prime—or so this graphic at the top of Google’s search results claims. You know, Amazon Prime: the place where the film is not free with a Prime Subscription, and they try to trick you into buying a Starz subscription. … Read more
If you keep your eyes fixed on Little you can see he’s barely holding it together. As Wilder works through the lines, he gets closer to losing it. You can tell it’s a blown take because the laughter is a spontaneous eruption, a thing that clearly wasn’t supposed to happen—and because Wilder glances up at … Read more
Some of the company’s tactics post-merger were garden-variety ruthless, like eliminating 87 series from its streaming platform Max, so that they won’t have to pay union-mandated residuals to the talent that created already-existing programs or pony up funds to produce more seasons of existing ones (such as “Our Flag Means Death,” one of the company’s … Read more
It may seem like it but it’s not every day a living legend releases a movie at the local multiplex and it just sort of passes from discussion in a couple of days. On this site, Matt Zoller Seitz, a man who knows, gave John Woo’s “Silent Night” one of the few positive reviews I read, but … Read more
But I loved the Spielberg adaptation of Alice Walker’s book and was excited to discuss it with my teacher when school resumed. She insisted I read the novel before we talked, so I did. The film showed me a different side of Spielberg and also introduced me to Alice Walker, so: double-win. 1986: “The Mission.” … Read more
The 119th Unloved is on a bonafide forgotten gem. “Our Mother’s House” is the kind of movie that only a small number of initiated viewers have heard of, let alone seen, but everyone who has will be shaken by it for the rest of their lives. Next month marks the tenth anniversary of this little video essay … Read more
Though global climate change has sucked some of the fun out of autumn by messing with its timeline, I’m still getting ready to ring in the spookiest season with this new fall cult classic, a great and underappreciated zombie comedy from the great Jim Jarmusch. As is thematically appropriate, “The Dead Don’t Die” is very much a movie from … Read more
“A Hen in the Wind” was an Ozu movie that I hadn’t even heard of before I sat down with my dear friends Ben and Kat Sachs and Jake Mulligan at the Harvard Film Archive, a theater I’ve been lucky enough to visit since I first arrived in Cambridge for school in 2008. Seeing Ozu on … Read more