12 Angry Men: Choosing Life or Death
Photo: United Artists The most famous episode of the CBS anthology series Studio One (1947-1958) is from 1954 and features a teleplay by Reginald Rose. Depicting a process where one…
Interstellar: Escape from Earth
Matthew McConaughey. Photo: Warner The day I saw this movie, I woke up feeling sad over what is a very common dream for me. It had taken me back to…
Wages of Fear: Road to Hell
Photo: Cinédis When this film was made, Yves Montand carried enough clout to reportedly make director Henri-Georges Clouzot change his mind on where to shoot it. Clouzot's original plans were…
Mystic River: Gone Girl
Sean Penn. Photo: Warner After the phenomenal Unforgiven (1992), the movie that won Clint Eastwood an Oscar as director, the aging director went on making a slew of films in…
Il Capitano: Drifting
Antti Reini and Maria Heiskanen. Photo: Sandrews On July 3rd 1988, a married couple and their 15-year-old son were murdered in a small community called Åmsele in northern Sweden. Father…
Breaking Bad: Journey to Damnation
Aaron Paul and Bryan Cranston. Photo: AMC On several occasions, Vince Gilligan has pointed out that Breaking Bad could never have existed without The X-Files (1993-2002). The sci-fi show may…
Midnight Express: Trapped in Turkey
Brad Davis. Photo: Columbia When Barack Obama became president, Republicans accused him of embarking on an apology tour. Well, here's an example of a cultural event that did lead to…
Das Boot: Under Pressure
Photo: Bavaria Film On my last visit to New York City, I visited the Intrepid Museum and boarded USS Growler, the 1950s-era cruise missile submarine that is part of the…
The Abyss: On the Edge of Darkness
Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and Ed Harris. Photo: 20th Century Fox Watching a good movie like The Abyss and knowing the kind of negative feelings that surrounded the production of it makes you…
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
In the near future, San Francisco scientist Will Rodman (James Franco) has invented a drug that is supposed to cure Alzheimer's... but its most dramatic effect is on apes in…