Search for 8

November 17, 1978: A day that will live in infamy, at least for Star Wars fans. The Star Wars Holiday Special, a 2-hour TV show that aired on CBS, was intended to give fans something to bridge the gap between the summer 1977 release of A New Hope ...

For many years (16 in particular), Return of the Jedi was considered the weakest of the Star Wars films. Then, in 1999, along came The Phantom Menace to displace it in the minds of many. Left unrealized as the prequels began their theatrical tour is ...

When I was sitting in a theater during the summer of 1977 enthralled by the spectacle that was Star Wars, never did I imagine that, some 31 years later, I would find myself wishing it would go away. Overmerchandising, fan unfriendliness, and greed...

For three years, we waited. As bits of news filtered through the Hollywood grapevine into the trade papers and Starlog, we gobbled them up. Still, by early 1980, not much was known about Star Wars 2 (officially retitled The Empire Strikes Back by the...

The passage of time has labeled 1983’s Staying Alive as a turkey, but the contemporaneous view (at least to Paramount’s bean counters) was somewhat different. Although critics lambasted the movie upon its release, with Roger Ebert giving an es...

When did Will Ferrell stop being funny? It wasn't that long ago that this Saturday Night Live alum looked to be following in the footsteps of the likes of Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler but, somewhere along the way, Ferrell's train derailed. Now, on...

With Step Up 2 the Streets, the supposed-but-not-really sequel to 2006's sleeper Step Up, you get what you pay for. That is to say, there are lots of energetic dance moves, throbbing music that uses every channel of the theater's digital sound sys...

Spoilers (including revelations about the ending)!By 1987, the (first) slasher-film craze had reached its apex. Proven box office winners because of their gory appeal, slashers could be made for next-to-nothing and almost always turned a profi...

Stepmom is the kind of bad movie that can be blamed on just about everyone involved except, perhaps, the actors. There's nothing wrong with any of the performances, although they're wasted in the service of inferior material. The script is a mish...

Movie-goers and critics alike have come to associate science fiction motion pictures with noisy space battles, grotesque aliens, and budgets that excel the GNP of a small country. Often, these sorts of films are characterized by scripts that could...