In the early 1950’s, the height of the Hollywood studio system, the independent film was a rarity. Made in 1953 on a shoestring budget by writer/directors Raymond Abrashkin (as “Ray Ashley”), Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin, Little Fugitive represented the…
Released in 1976, at the height of the New York exploitation era in film, Massage Parlor Murders (also known as Massage Parlor Hookers) chronicles the terror that unfolds when a killer focuses his attention on the working girls at a…
A rather conventional biopic about a decidedly unconventional couple, Philip Kaufman’s HBO telefilm Hemingway & Gellhorn traces the tumultuous relationship between writers Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn. Two of America’s most respected novelists and war correspondents of the 20th century,…
A family friendly coming of age story with baseball at its center, it seems appropriate that the 20th Anniversary Edition of The Sandlot was released just a few days before the 2013 season openers. Narrated by an adult who remembers…
Colonel Blimp started as a comic strip by David Low in the 1930’s. The strip was a satirical look at the aging military generals of the time; creaky tough old birds who hammered home their traditional English virtues, despite being…
Adapted from Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 novella Carmilla, The Vampire Lovers represents a major entry in the Hammer Films catalog, becoming the first part of what would become known as the Karnstein Trilogy. Rife with female nudity and lesbian…
Panic in the Streets arrived rather early in director Elia Kazan’s career. When the film was released in 1950, Kazan was really just breaking free of the studio and theatrical constraints that he felt hampered much of his earlier work,…
Trying to tell the life story of Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States, on the big screen would be a gargantuan if not impossible task. Long a passion project of Steven Spielberg, the famed director wisely decided to…
The fourth weekly Star Trek series, Enterprise was greeted by a somewhat skeptical fan base when it debuted in 2001.With the pilot airing roughly two weeks after the end of Star Trek: Voyager, some questioned whether those behind the franchise…
Director Peter Jackson has returned to Middle Earth with co-writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens to bring J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit to the big screen over the course of three films. Certainly, the question of whether a 310 page novel…