Blue Velvet: Quite an Earful

Kyle MacLachlan and Isabella Rossellini. Photo: De Laurentiis Entertainment Group In his annual movie guide, Leonard Maltin expresses amazement at how Blue Velvet was a critically lauded film. Roger Ebert wrote about…

Pretty Woman

Depressed corporate raider Edward Lewis (Richard Gere) hooks up with a Hollywood Boulevard prostitute (Julia Roberts) and realizes she’s a human being. An enormous box-office hit at the time, this…

Freaky Friday 

Teenager Annabel (Jodie Foster) and her mother (Barbara Harris) magically switch bodies and try to deal with each other’s challenges. When Mary Rodgers wrote her novel, the concept of characters…

Best Years of Our Lives: Coming Home

Myrna Loy and Fredric March. Photo: RKO The premiere of The Best Years of Our Lives seemed to hit America like a ton of bricks. Coming the year after the…

Last Tango in Paris: Dark Moments Together

Maria Schneider and Marlon Brando. Photo: United Artists The scene in Last Tango in Paris where Marlon Brando anally rapes Maria Schneider was controversial at the time of the release…

Andrei Rublev: Before the Tsars

Photo: Mosfilm Andrei Tarkovsky’s wildly ambitious second film was shown in a cinema in 1966. The audience seemed to like it, but the Soviet censors refused to approve the epic…

Happiest Season 

Harper (Mackenzie Davis) is spending Christmas together with her family and her girlfriend Abby (Kristen Stewart)… but on the journey home she tells Abby that she hasn’t come out to…

Muriel’s Wedding 

Muriel (Toni Collette), a bullied, ABBA-loving young woman in a small town, steal $12,000 to join her ”friends” on an island vacation. The director’s feature film debut was an international…

The Christmas Chronicles Part Two 

Kate (Darby Camp) comes to the North Pole and meets Santa Claus (Kurt Russell) again, but they realize that she was being used by a resentful former elf (Julian Dennison)…