After Hours Is A Rapid-Fire Dark Comedy Gem

Typically, Martin Scorsese movies are known for their expansive nature. They follow gangsters for numerous years of their lives, they follow Jesus Christ all the way to a theoretical life hinging on him never getting crucified or they follow the lead character of Silence as he grapples with his personal religious calling over decades. This means After Hours is an intriguing anomaly in his filmography, it takes place over the course of a single night. This is a far leaner Scorsese motion picture all about cramming as much as possible into a small amount of time, which means both the protagonist and camera are constantly being whipped across the screen to some new sight that's bound to fascinate the audience.

North Texas Film Festival 2019: Re-Animator Is Brazenly Weird Creepy Horror Fare And That's A Compliment

Don't bring things back to the dead. If I've learned anything from horror movies, beyond the importance of not going to that creepy campground on the tenth anniversary of the night all those counselors died, it's that trying to bring people back from the dead is a recipe for inevitable disaster. Ever since the days of Mary Shelley's original Frankenstein novel, scientists meddling in the process of resurrecting the deceased has always resulted in tragedy rather than Nobel Peace prizes. Nobody seems to realize this in the world of movie scientists but at least their inability to learn yields some fun movies like Re-Animator.

Police Story Saw Jackie Chan Establish Himself As The Buster Keaton of Action Movies

The 1980s were the era of action movie stars as the likes of Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis and all the other people who nowadays headline direct-to-Redbox fare were titans of the silver screen as they beat up nefarious foes in an R-rated fashion and delivered corny one-liners. America wasn't the only country where an action movie star established his prowess in the 1980s, though, Hong Kong also saw Jackie Chan solidify himself as an action movie leading man with a whole array of iconic titles. One of those titles was Police Story, which saw Chan stepping behind the camera to direct the proceedings. In the process, he depicted so much creative flair that it was clear that Chan was clearly something special in the world of action movie stars.

Clue Is Easily The Best Film Adaptation of a Toy (Exempting The LEGO Movie)

Movies based on toys haven't taken off to the same extreme as comic books or TV shows since, like video games, artistic properties that place most control over to the audiences tend to be difficult to translate into a more strictly molded medium of storytelling like film. Still, we have seen our fair share of movies based on toys, especially in the last twelve years since Transformers became a box office juggernaut. Before most of those motion pictures came Clue, one of the very first movies to be based on a toy. A 1985 directorial effort from Johnathan Lynn, Clue took the characters and murder mystery set-up of the original 1949 board game of the same name and in the process took what could have been a cashgrab for Hasbro into something mighty hysterical.

Pee-wee's Big Adventure Is A Wacky & Hysterical Romp

It's old hat to describe a film as like a child playing with their toys, but that truly is what Pee-wee's Big Adventure feels like at times as its titular lead character gets into all sorts of antics without much care for how or why they're happening. It's all a bunch of reckless lunacy that would make Bugs Bunny proud and like so many of those Bugs Bunny cartoons, the antics of Pee-wee Herman are utterly hilarious. Serving as the directorial debut for Tim Burton, Pee-wee's Big Adventure is an outlandish hoot that managed to turn a total Pee-wee Herman newbie like myself into a total convert, I can totally see why this character is so widely beloved now.

Desert Hearts Is An Outstanding Poignant Character-Driven Motion Picture

The night of November 29, 2018, was a somber one for film geeks like yours truly. This was the final night of existence for FilmStruck, a wonderful streaming service haven for discovering cinema of all shapes and sizes. Its demise ensured thanks to the idiocy of its new AT&T corporate masters, I was determined to spend this night bidding adieu to this streaming service by watching one last movie on FilmStruck. But what movie? After all, there were so many choices available on FilmStruck! To help me break through all those options, I asked my friends through social media what movie I should watch on here and one of those suggestions happened to be for the 1985 Donna Deitch directorial effort Desert Hearts.

The Purple Rose Of Cairo Has The Magic Of Movies Brought To Life

It is so much fun when a movie has a unique concept at the core of its story and it manages to fully utilize the creative potential behind said unique concept. Such is the case with Woody Allen's 1985 motion picture The Purple Rose Of Cairo, which feels similar to the director's 2011 effort Midnight In Paris (my personal favorite Woody Allen joint) in how it takes a very high-concept central idea and executes it in a more subdued character-centric manner. For Midnight In Paris, the heightened idea that drove the story was time travel, while The Purple Rose Of Cairo focuses on a character in a movie leaping off into the real world.

The Breakfast Club Review (Classic Write-Up)

John Hughes isn't for me. After disliking Ferris Bueller's Day Off and especially Home Alone, it was a concept that crossed my cranium, but I decided to put off making any definitive statements regarding his career until I watched the movie many considered to be his greatest achievement; The Breakfast Club. Released in 1985, the feature was a sleeper hit upon its initial release and become a greatly prized motion picture in the 31 years since its debut. Millions of High Schoolers have found solace in the film and I'm so glad that they did. High School is such a miserable, terrible, awful, horrible, abysmal, hellish place and it's good to think that any piece of pop culture got so many individuals through this treacherous part of their life.

"But Don't You Go Anywhere": The All Too Real Fantasy World Of Calvin And Hobbes

Good stories endure. There's a reason the plays of William Shakespeare still get performed to rapturous reception, and it's the same reason why Mark Twain still has countless copies of his books sold across the country every year. Characters that one can relate to, humor that strikes ones funny bone just right, pathos that hit home for all of us, those are the ingredients that can make a piece of pop culture stick around through the ages. In this case, those are the exact elements that have helped an eight year old boy and his tiger be discovered by new readers even after its stopped creating new
content twenty years earlier.