After the critical and commercial success of Midnight Cowboy, the late director John Schlesinger had the freedom to pursue the project of his choice. Deciding not to play it safe, Schlesinger chose Sunday Bloody Sunday, a thoughtful film about homosexuality,…
First aired on ABC during the 2009 holiday season, Prep & Landing introduces us to Lanny (Derek Richardson) and Wayne (voiced by Dave Foley), two Christmas elves on the “prep & landing team.” Their job is to prepare homes for the…
Made by Frank Sinatra before he won an Academy Award for From Here to Eternity (though it was released nearly a year later), Suddenly marked the first time Sinatra played the “heavy.” The title refers to a small town in…
Whether or not you’ll enjoy The Expendables 2 is a very easy question to answer. If you’re an action junkie, Sylvester Stallone and the rest of his buddies have provided the perfect medicine. For the rest of you, have aspirin…
Released in 2007, Pixar’s first collection of short films offered a glimpse of the company’s evolution from 1984 through 2006. Watching that first collection, it’s fascinating to witness the tremendous leaps in CGI that were occurring during Pixar’s earliest efforts….
Perhaps stung by the charges of racism that surrounded the release of The Birth of a Nation in 1916, when D.W. Griffith set out to make his first talkie he hoped to adapt Stephen Vincent Benet’s Civil War inspired prose…
Loosely adapted from novelist Walter Wager’s 1971 thriller, Viper Three, Twilight’s Last Gleaming sets up an improbable plot, but still manages to be an interesting film with clearly more in mind than being just a standard thriller. Directed by Robert…
With 2011’s Cars 2, the Pixar brain trust (namely John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton and Pete Docter) took a bit of hit. For the first time in the studio’s history really, some began to wonder if after an unprecedented string of…
By its second season, Alice became a real hit, finishing the year at #8 in the Nielsen ratings. Mel Sharples (Vic Tayback), the proprietor of Mel’s Diner, a greasy spoon eatery in Phoenix and his waitresses, Alice (Linda Lavin), Flo…
If ever the future of the Muppets was unclear, the early 1990’s was the time. Creator, father and lead puppeteer Jim Henson had died suddenly at age 53 in 1990. The Muppet Show, canceled nearly a decade earlier, had quietly…