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(Spoilers, as one might expect from a retrospective of a 50-year old movie.)Midnight Cowboy, the only X-rated film to win a Best Picture Oscar, is less shocking than its reputation might indicate. Essentially a two-character buddy film, the ma...

From time-to-time, I suppose we all succumb to daydreams of what it might be like to have lived during a different, perhaps simpler era. Filmmaker Woody Allen, whose cinematic recipes have often incorporated more than a pinch of nostalgia, embraces...

One thing is certain about Clint Eastwood: he doesn't play it safe. Two years ago, he surprised just about everyone (and gave his fans a collective apoplexy) by directing and starring in an ultra-sensitive tearjerker called The Bridges of Madison...

If you’re in the mood for an overdose of (early) ‘80s nostalgia, Midnight Madness has your fix. Watching the film, which was made in 1980, offers a reflection of the kind of escapism that dominated the teen-oriented cinema of the era. Toda...

It’s difficult to express how refreshing it is to encounter a dystopian film that hasn’t been developed for the YA market. Although flavored at times by its twin inspirations Gravity and The Revenant, The Midnight Sky maintains its own uni...

Midnighters takes a common situation – one fueled by too much alcohol and too little attentiveness while driving – and uses it as the jumping-off point for a series of events that puts a working class couple’s life into a tailspin. With ...

Ari Aster, the director of Hereditary and Midsommar, has described his brand of filmmaking as “existential horror.” To be sure, it’s a much different breed of the genre than one typically finds in multiplexes, trading in jump scares for ...

The film opens in an amphitheater in Greece, with an appropriately-garbed Greek chorus chanting of the deeds of Achilles and Oedipus. Suddenly, unexpectedly, the masked men and women decide to switch to the tale of Lenny Weinrib (Woody Allen) -- d...

Most world renowned people have achieved that status as a result of something accomplished during their lives. Unfortunately, Daniel Pearl was among the few who became famous as a result of his death. Pearl's kidnapping and subsequent death at the...

When Mighty Joe Young first reached screens in 1949, nearly everyone recognized it as an attempt to re-create the magic and mystique of King Kong. Many of the same people were involved -- Ernest B. Schoedsack in the director's chair, Robert Armstr...