Roger’s very first Top 10 list for The Chicago Sun-Times, his home outlet for decades, listed a lot of movies that were probably common sights on other people’s lists, including “The Graduate,” “Blowup,” “Ulysses,” “A Man for All Seasons,” and the eventual Oscar winner “In the Heat of the Night.” It also included “Bonnie and … Read more
“Hugo” “Hugo” celebrates the birth of the cinema and dramatizes Scorsese’s personal pet cause, the preservation of old films. In one heartbreaking scene, we learn that Melies, convinced his time had passed and his work had been forgotten, melted down countless films so that their celluloid could be used to manufacture the heels of women’s … Read more
On an ordinary day in 1986, executives from the Walt Disney Studio piled into a screening room to see what $100,000 had bought them. That’s what they had paid for a proof-of-concept screen test for an upcoming film. If they liked what they saw, the project could move forward. If they didn’t, the movie would likely get axed. What they saw, … Read more
The creator of one of the most iconic posters in movie history has died. Roger Kastel was as an acclaimed illustrator and artist whose work appeared in many forms — but his single most famous piece is the one that became the poster for Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, with its bullet-shaped Great White shark racing out of the … Read more
“The Color of Money” “If this movie had been directed by someone else, I might have thought differently about it because I might not have expected so much. But “The Color of Money” is directed by Martin Scorsese, the most exciting American director now working, and it is not an exciting film. It doesn’t have … Read more
“Memento” “The purpose of the movie is not for us to solve the murder of the wife (“I can’t remember to forget you,” he says of her). If we leave the theater not sure exactly what happened, that’s fair enough. The movie is more like a poignant exercise, in which Leonard’s residual code of honor … Read more
1990’s”Goodfellas“earned another four stars from Roger, who felt that Scorsese was the only director for this material because he knew it inside and out.”Most films, even great ones, evaporate like mist once you’ve returned to the real world; they leave memories behind, but their reality fades fairly quickly,” Roger wrote. “Not this film, which shows … Read more
“Cloud Atlas” One of the things I admired most about Roger was that, while he often had his biases around genre (and medium, as his takes on video games can attest), the right film could hit him in a magical, undeniable way. And so it went with Roger’s review of one of the 21st century’s … Read more