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Over the past two decades, horror movies have increasingly gravitated toward jump-scare experiences: stories more interested in delivering sudden shocks than developing suspense through mood and atmosphere. This dumbing down of horror, which h...

It Follows, as uncommon a horror film as you're likely to find in the wasteland of PG-13 mediocrity defining the genre today, takes its inspiration from a film that's 37 years old. By echoing John Carpenter's Halloween (not in terms of na...

Frank Capra's It Happened One Night represents one of the great romantic comedy "templates." Although the film has officially been remade a handful of times (most not in English), its opposites-attract melding of screwball comedy and the road trip...

Every year around Christmas, there are two stories guaranteed to show up somewhere, sometime on television: A Christmas Carol (of which there are several good versions) and It's a Wonderful Life (of which there is only one). After its copyrig...

For Nancy Meyers, whose Hollywood career began with screenplay and producer credits for Private Benjamin and whose first stint behind the director's chair occurred in 1998 with the Lindsay Lohan remake of The Parent Trap (back when Lohan was still ...

It's rare that a story set within the confines of a mental ward/hospital/asylum cannot be said to owe a debt to Milos Forman's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. It's Kind of a Funny Story is a case in point. Even though the basic narrative bears l...

It is sometimes said that there’s no such thing as “too much of a good thing.” In the case of Stephen King’s It, that may not be true. Clocking in at a bloated 170 minutes, It Chapter Two is a full 35 minutes longer than Chapter One an...

The 2003 version of The Italian Job is less of a straightforward remake of the 1969 picture than it is a complete re-interpretation. Enough has changed that it's possible to see the two films not as the same story separated by three decades, but a...

Ever wonder what a mumblecore road trip might be like? Whether intentional or not, that’s what Izzy Gets the Fuck Across Town feels like. (The “u” in the subversively titled film has been censored in posters and other marketing material ...

Who knew the life story of J. Edgar Hoover could be so arid? Actually, that's unfair, but there are stretches of J. Edgar when the proceedings seem to drag. Counterbalancing the occasional bursts of tedium, however, are a tremendous lead performanc...