Category: Director

  • The Exorcist (1973)

    Even 50 years after audiences got the holy bejesus scared outta them in packed movie theaters, The Exorcist remains, in my estimation, one of the most frightening films ever made. Released the day after Christmas in 1973, it almost immediately leapt from blockbuster to cultural phenomenon, fueled by reports at the time of some moviegoers…

  • The One and Only (1978)

    The One and Only must have looked like a surefire hit on paper. After all, the 1978 romantic comedy starred Henry Winkler, aka The Fonz – resident icon at the time of TV’s hugely successful Happy Days – and was helmed by Carl Reiner, who had scored box-office gold the previous year with Oh, God!…

  • Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)

    Based on a series of graphic novels by Bryan Lee O’Malley, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is a movie with ADD and a lapsed Ritalin prescription. It moves with bullet-train speed, crackles with wit and packs enough hip pop-culture references to make Chuck Klosterman green with envy. There are nods to arcade games, comic books,…

  • Coraline (2009)

    Picasso mused that every child is born an artist, but that the hard part is how to remain one after they grow up. Nothing is more surreal or vivid than the imagination of a child, where even the most seemingly mundane experience can evoke stark fear or unbridled joy. It’s a frontier ripe for storytellers,…

  • Saboteur (1942)

    Saboteur is hardly top-tier Alfred Hitchcock, but even below-par Hitch is damned entertaining. And this wartime suspense yarn certainly holds your interest. It relies on a familiar theme of the director’s — an innocent man wrongly accused of a crime embarks on a cross-country chase to clear his good name — that he had used in…

  • Boyhood (2014)

    The swooning of critics over Boyhood upon its theatrical release reached near-embarrassing heights. There’s no getting around it; this is a remarkable movie and a testament to the singular vision of writer-director Richard Linklater. And while that doesn’t make Boyhood an unqualified triumph, its minor deficiencies are more than made up for by its overall…

  • Night Nurse (1931)

    Pulpy, violent and sexy (not necessarily in that order), Night Nurse presents a world seedy enough to make most noirs look like Disneyland by comparison. This Pre-Code gem is short, fast and slam-bang entertainment. Barbara Stanwyck stars as Lora Hart, a dedicated young nurse who lands work in a city hospital. There’s not much else…

  • Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)

    With a knockout of a premise and an ample supply of firepower, Assault on Precinct 13 heralded the arrival of a promising, workmanlike genre director in John Carpenter. The action-thriller slipped in an out of U.S. theaters in 1976 with little fanfare, but quickly achieved cult status across the Atlantic and helped set the stage for Carpenter’s…