Noah Baumbach’s films are largely character studies, and Frances Ha’s Frances Halliday—portrayed and co-created by Greta Gerwig, who shares screenwriting credit—is a study in contradictions. A dancer whose career is coming to an end before it ever really took off….
1976’s All the President’s Men dramatizes the Watergate scandal that had unfolded just a couple of years before. As with the book of the same name, the film witnesses the events through the eyes of young Washington Post reporters Carl…
A retelling of Cinderella, The Slipper and the Rose was released in 1976, a time when musicals had fallen out of favor at the box office. The British production, directed by Bryan Forbes (The Stepford Wives), produced by broadcaster David…
With the fiftieth anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination approaching, there’s been no shortage of tributes and recollections of that tragic day. One of the best programs thus far, a segment of PBS’ American Experience, JFK: Like No Other, manages…
Brian De Palma is one of the most respected, yet unpredictable directors of the last forty years. Responsible for the genre-defining greatness of Carrie (1976) and Scarface (1983), he also had some major disappointments such as Mission to Mars (2000)…
Sergio Leone’s Man with No Name Trilogy—A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)—made a movie star out of Clint Eastwood, but by the early 1970’s the spaghetti…
On February 24, 2010, one of SeaWorld’s most experienced trainers, forty-year old Dawn Brancheau, was pulled under water by the park’s largest Orca (most commonly referred to as killer whales),12,000 pound Tilikum and killed. A devastating event, the incident made…
In eleven years, and 278 episodes, The Carol Burnett Show never did a standalone Christmas special. In hindsight, that seems pretty amazing, given that the 1970’s was the era of annual yuletide greetings from the likes of Bob Hope, Perry…
John Cassavetes is considered by many the “father of American independent cinema.” Like any moniker, this can be debated, but Cassavetes was unquestionably nonconformist; an actor/writer/director that openly railed against set scripts, fancy crews and the Hollywood “star system.” His…
Joanne Woodward won an Oscar for her effective portrayal of Eve White, an otherwise normal housewife suffering from multiple-personality disorder in The Three Faces of Eve. Inside Eve White also lurks Eve Black, an aggressively sexual woman, and Jane, a…