---

ADVERTISEMENT Events such as the Sundance Film Festival, the Toronto Film Festival, and the Cannes Film Festival cast huge shadows over the movie industry.  In the case of Sundance, this has led to numerous complaints about the festival more or less betraying its roots as an opportunity to experience independent, or “indie”, movies.  But numerous [...]

Determining the ten best film ensembles of the 21st Century was a much harder list to narrow down than I originally anticipated. There are a lot of movies that succeed on the basis of having a lot of big-name stars attached to them. To create a list like this, I tried to focus on movies [...]

Our minds allow us to interpret what we perceive externally, yet there is still so much left unexplained about the mind itself.  If it is true we only use a fraction of our total brain capacity, what exactly is left untapped?  While a lot is yet to be uncovered, we already have a pretty impressive [...]

Anyone who has ever watched some cheesy B-movie on SyFy, or some aspiring college kid’s weird and stilted little video, probably never would have thought anything would come of the directors responsible for those.  Well, as we’ll see, perhaps these now-famous directors shouldn’t be written off so quickly. 10. Bedhead (Robert Rodriguez) From the creator [...]

Academic books and essays about movies use lofty phrases and multi-layered interpretations to make the fact the authors have watched movies too many times seem like an insightful and meaningful practice. Anyone who has spent much time on a movie set realizes that’s usually giving filmmakers a bit too much credit. In fact, as we’ll [...]

The first commercially screened movie was Workers Leaving the Factory, and it was… workers leaving a factory. With competition like that, and in the notoriously repressive nature of Elizabethan times, you probably expect the early movies to all be dull and predictable. Don’t you believe it. In the days before censors, focus groups, or rules [...]

For decades, the world of directing was a male dominated landscape.  While there have been female directors since the inception of cinema in the late Nineteenth century, few have ever garnered the same success or recognition as their male peers.  This list is devoted to ten of the greatest female directors who ever lived.  They were women who [...]

The term “horror movie” first appeared in the writings of critics in response to the release of Universal’s Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931).  The term has since come to describe any film that strives to elicit the emotion of fear, disgust, and shock.  A large collection of classic scary movies have screenplays that are based [...]

Today, when most people hear the words “silent comedy” they probably think of things like Charlie Chaplin’s silhouette framed in the sunset or twinkly piano music playing over barely decipherable grainy images and, perhaps, people getting kicked up the arse. A lot. However, behind the music and hand-cranked camera shots lie something else entirely, for [...]

With approximately ten gazillion alien creatures packed into the Star Wars universe, you can count on there being one to creep out almost anybody. Some of the most memorable creatures in the original films could have easily carried their own horror stories, adding excitement and danger to these beloved classics with their inventively threatening designs [...]