“That was the summer of 1963” opens Dirty Dancing, a movie that set out to create a time capsule for the Kennedy administration and ended up inadverte…
The Film Canon
A series of articles and reviews of older movies that have entered, well, the film canon, for being creatively or culturally important. Everything from Citizen Kane to The Breakfast Club to Fargo to The Dark Knight. So we can all create a diverse list of essential movies for the young folk cinephiles to watch
The Film Canon: Spider-Man 2 (2004)
What a world of difference there is between the superhero blockbuster of today and the superhero blockbuster of 2004. What a vast, vast world of diffe…
The Film Canon: The Last Unicorn (1982)
Some movies just stay with you. Admittedly, I didn’t rewatch The Last Unicorn over and over as I did with more mainstream animated classics like…
The Film Canon: Bad Lieutenant
Bad Lieutenant, set in a particularly grimy-looking New York, lugs around enough Catholic-guilt, crooked cops, cocaine snorting and a somewhat-conscio…
The Film Canon: The Fly (1986)
David Cronenberg has long established himself to be a maverick in the world of film since his humble beginnings in the 1970s. From a career perspectiv…
A Scanner Darkly: 10 Year Anniversary
In the author’s note of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly the author states, “drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the dec…
The Film Canon: A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)
Among the biggest negative effects of the auteur theory is the idea that filmmakers are knowable; that every director not only has a distinctive influ…