Retro Review: Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining Once Defined Horror, Today It’s Stating the Obvious
Even if you’ve never seen it, it’s hard to separate the legend of The Shining from the film itself. Its key moments have become part of our cultural lexicon. “Heeeere’s Johnny!” “Redrum” “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” It has been parodied by The Simpsons and Key & Peele. It inspired…
Double Your Hard-Boiled Pleasure With This Year’s Noir City Festival
As temperatures drop and fallen leaves remind us of the cycle of life and decay, October arrives and with it the return of Noir City D.C.: The Washington D.C. Film Noir Festival. As always, Eddie Muller and the Film Noir Foundation bring a smartly selected lineup of crime dramas to Silver Spring’s AFI Silver for…
How Scream Rebooted a Genre That Was Bleeding Out
“Be careful,” Randy says near the end of Scream. “They always come back for one last scare.” He might have been talking about the genre itself. Horror has existed nearly since the beginning of cinema, but in 1996 it was on its last breath due to a series of declining sequels to slasher classics such…
Not Only Does Joker: Folie à Deux Waste Lady Gaga’s Talent, It’s a Tedious Bore to Boot
Superhero movies were at the peak of their popularity when Joker first hit theaters in 2019. It arrived months after Avengers: Endgame became a box office megahit, and for fans worldwide, co-writer and director Todd Phillips’ origin story for Batman’s primary adversary represented the genre’s potential to be taken seriously. Although Joker borrowed heavily from…
Calamity Now
“A film director is one of the last truly dictatorial posts left,” Francis Ford Coppola said with just a trace of wistfulness in 1990, “in a world that’s getting more and more democratic.” The observation comes from Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, the superb 1991 documentary looking back on what in the mid-’70s seemed…