Tag: movies

Sometimes, the review is better than the film it reviews.

Journalist Donna Minkowitz realizes 25 years later she was victim to her own internalized homophobia and ignorance on trans issues when she broke the story of Brandon Teena, subject of Boys Don’t Cry.

Superheroes they used to stick up for the underdog and punch a lot of Nazis. Now, they fight villains who look a lot like themselves. Who are the baddies now?

Journalists who get screen time are most often men—even when the original story was told by a woman.

How does a young, successful actor become a relatively unknown director of most of the television you watch? And what’s next?

No other film conveys the madness or the fun of deadline journalism.

When it came to gathering refugees, the waiting room of the U.S. consulate was probably the closest thing to Rick’s Café Américain.

Five stories about movies, for your reading pleasure.

The zombie movie is more than an easy scare. It’s also become an essential lens through which we can view society.

Alamo Drafthouse creator Tim League wants to make moviegoing fun again.

The 1979 summer camp comedy was Bill Murray’s breakout film. It also almost didn’t happen.

The scene was restored, but thanks to Richard Nixon, a song about conservatism was cut from the 1972 movie “1776.”

Is this the end of an era for the brilliant, if reluctant, male movie star?

The film, which turned 20 this week, feels incredibly out of step with our dystopian present.

Robert Kolker walks us through the $400 billion lawsuit brought by the creators of This Is Spinal Tap against the movie studios, but Spinal Tap fans will love the insider tidbits about the creation of the film.

It has stifled suffrage, blamed immigrants for chaos, and suppressed civil rights. It’s also how Donald Trump views the entire world.

Daniel Miller goes behind the scenes to report on the famed red carpet that graces the entrance to the Oscars. What you learn about the care, installation, and true color of this 50,000 square foot rug may just surprise you.

Christopher Orr, film critic for The Atlantic, watched Fifty Shades Darker — the second film in the series based on the super popular Fifty Shades of Gray books — so that you don’t have to.

How Inception changed the way we listen to movies.

Can Hollywood get pregnant women right?

Why can’t we let go of Mermaids-era Winona Ryder? Soraya Roberts at Hazlitt explores the last great pre-internet icon.

The writers of the classic 1980 comedy deconstruct their screenplay for New York magazine.

Prior to the ’70s, midnight shows were the realm of the occasional horror release and exploitation distributors who used the slot to attract night owls to seedy fare. But the midnight movie as we know it — as a Friday- and Saturday-night staple featuring cult films — came into its own as the ’60s turned […]

In a conversation with New York magazine, Nancy Meyers talks about her new film The Intern, and why she didn’t want to write another romantic comedy.

Readers often wonder how much of an author’s real life ends up in their novels. In 2013 in the Virginia Quarterly Review, novelist Nina Revoyr described how she combined elements of her life with the real lives of silent-film era actors Sessue Hayakawa and Mary Miles Minter in her book The Age of Dreaming. Revoyr […]

Jamie Tarabay explored Hollywood’s relationship with the Pentagon in a recent piece for Al Jazeera America. The Pentagon has a devoted “entertainment-liaison officer” who acts as a Hollywood point person and helps decide which projects get Pentagon support (in the form of expertise, equipment, and locations). According to scholar Lawrence Suid, the Hollywood military relationship relationship dates back to […]

This whitewashing of Jewishness out of pop culture is an old, old story, and it isn’t specific to camp movies; it’s true of plenty of other Hollywood representations of American teens, too. The Czech Jew who wrote the novel that was the basis for Gidget (1959) was inspired by his own surfing daughter, Kathy Kohner, who went on […]

John Crutchfield’s “Toward an Aesthetics of Failure” explains why he still loves the out-of-fashion western despite repetitive plots, one-dimension characters, and shoddy filmmaking — and why you should, too.

The period known as “Classic Hollywood” began in the late ‘20s/early ‘30s, with the gradual consolidation of the studios, and ends at a nebulous point in the 1950s. In the earliest days of the so-called “movie colony,” you could get a job in the moving pictures if you a) had a great face (Clara Bow); […]

[Harmony] Korine, nineteen at the time, and [Larry] Clark, then over fifty, wrangled the troops from the skate clique, supplementing them with more non-actors from Washington Square Park and the club scene, and across downtown—including Chloë Sevigny, from tony Darien, Connecticut, who had been hanging out with the crew in Washington Square Park for years. They […]