8 Movie Collection: Star-Studded Drama
February 6, 2013
With All the Pretty Horses (2000), director Billy Bob Thornton set out to make a Heaven’s Gate (1980) for the new millennium by adapting Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name. However, movie studio executives took the film away from him and recut...
Carlos: Criterion Collection
October 3, 2011
Notorious international terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez a.k.a. Carlos the Jackal came to prominence in the 1970’s and 1980’s with several politically-motivated bombings, kidnappings and hijackings in Europe and the Middle East. He eventually became...
Patty Hearst
May 27, 2011
Coming off the commercial and critical failure that was Light of Day (1987), Paul Schrader went on to direct Patty Hearst (1988), a low budget docudrama about the kidnapping of Patricia Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) in 1974. Based on...
William & Kate: The Movie
May 3, 2011
In November 2010, Prince William, second in line to the English throne behind his father, the Prince of Wales, and son of the laudable sadly deceased Princess Diana, announced his engagement to Catherine Middleton. They met when both were undergraduates...
Topsy-Turvy: Criterion Collection
March 31, 2011
You have to hand it to Mike Leigh, a filmmaker who has the confidence to make a $20 million period musical with limited commercial appeal. In 1999, he released Topsy-Turvy, a musical drama chronicling W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s creation of The...
Secretariat
January 18, 2011
After failing to win an Academy Award in 2002 for her brave performance in Unfaithful (losing out to Nicole Kidman in The Hours), cynical pundits surmised that Diane Lane took on the role of Penny Chenery, the owner of the legendary race horse Secretariat,...
Cher: The Film Collection
November 22, 2010
Here’s a film that I bet William Friedkin would like to forget. At a time when popular musical acts like The Beatles and The Monkees were starring in movie musicals, Sonny and Cher decided to cash in on the trend too with Good Times (1967). Bored between...
Stevie Wonder – Biography Channel
July 30, 2010
Stevie Wonder – or Steveland Hardaway Judkins to his mother – needs no introduction. Were he on a Top Trumps card, his stats would look something like this: Top ten US hits: 30 No.1 US Hits: 10, Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame: Inducted,...
Can’t Stop the Music
June 28, 2010
For those not in the know, The Village People are a concept disco collective, formed in America. The brains of the outfit, Jacques Morali, was responsible for penning the tunes and formed the band after placing an ad in a music magazine which read ‘must...
Che: Criterion Collection
January 14, 2010
Che (2008) began as a personal project for actor Benicio del Toro around the time he was making Traffic (2000) with Steven Soderbergh. Originally, he planned on making the film about iconic revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara with Terrence Malick...
