Category: Genre

  • Mission: Impossible (1996)

    Loosely based on the espionage TV series of the late 1960s, Mission: Impossible finds Tom Cruise as secret agent Ethan Hunt, the point man for a team of IMF spies headed by Jim Phelps (Jon Voight reprising the only character originally from the TV show). Trouble ensues when Phelps’ team is assigned to keep a list of…

  • The Wedding Singer (1998)

    Cauliflower isn’t the most flavorful of veggies, but slather it in ranch dressing and it’s damned tasty. Why do I tell you this? It’s akin to my theory about why The Wedding Singer remains such a pleasant (if unremarkable) romantic comedy 25 years after its theatrical release. It’s all about The Wedding Singer‘s slathering of…

  • The Roost (2005)

    The Roost is for horror fans who fondly recall the heyday of drive-in theaters and pot-addled midnight screenings. Director Ti West’s über-low-budget debut mines the less-is-more approach carved out by the likes of George A. Romero‘s Night of the Living Dead and early John Carpenter pictures. The premise is lean. Four young people (Karl Jacob,…

  • The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

    Among the final pictures by John Ford, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance reveals the legendary filmmaker poking a stick at the Old West mythologies he helped create. It’s one of the director’s best, and that’s saying something for the guy who gave us Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath, My Darling Clementine, How Green Was…

  • The Past (2013)

    Asghar Farhadi burst on the international stage with 2011’s Oscar-winning A Separation, but he was making accomplished films in his native Iran well before the rest of the world took notice. Case in point is The Past, a brutally effectivre exploration of domestic crisis. It begins as Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) returns to Paris after four…

  • Baby It’s You (1983)

    Writer-director John Sayles has a gift for taking the most cliché-riddled formula and then – voila! – skirting cliché. Such is the redemptive power of full-blooded characterization and an understanding that people are unpredictable. Baby It’s You is a modest story of young love, but it nicely illustrates the filmmaker’s knack for wringing genuine complexity from what otherwise could…

  • Ghost (1990)

    I wasn’t impressed when I first saw Ghost in the theater back in 1990. At the time, I was a twenty-something cinephile (or movie geek, to be blunt about it) fond of overusing terms like auteur and mise-en-scène, and so I turned my nose up and dismissed the box-office blockbuster as a sappy crowd-pleaser. Now much older and marginally wiser, I…

  • Big Leaguer (1953)

    Spring is here, and with the sights and sounds of rebirth – flowers blooming, birds chirping, suffering masses enduring hay fever – come thoughts of baseball … well, at least if you happen to be a baseball fan (Major League Baseball’s season begins this week, in case you care.) Any buff of the once-upon-a-time national…