From Here to Eternity: Before Armageddon

Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr. Photo: Columbia This is what Michael Bay was aiming for when he made Pearl Harbor (2001) – a hopefully engaging romance that's suddenly interrupted by…

Saving Mr. Banks

In the early 1960s, P. L. Travers (Emma Thompson), the author of "Mary Poppins", finally gives in to Walt Disney's (Tom Hanks) relentless requests to make a movie out of…

12 Years a Slave: Land of the Unfree

Michael Fassbender and Chiwetel Ejiofor. Photo: Fox Searchlight The historian Sue Eakin was born in Louisiana five decades after the end of the Civil War and she specialized in the…

Wuthering Heights: Love in the Moors

Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon. Photo: United Artists During the making of this classic, there was tension on set. Two of the stars, Merle Oberon and David Niven, had been…

Rebel Without a Cause: Forever Young

James Dean. Photo: Warner Every time I watch this movie it's impossible not to think about the heartbreaking tragedies that ended the lives of its three young stars. This was…

Fruitvale Station: End of a Year and a Life

Michael B. Jordan and Ariana Neal. Photo: The Weinstein Company Fruitvale Station has become this year's Beasts of the Southern Wild. Much like that film, it came out of the…

Tokyo Story: In the Autumn Years

Setsuko Hara and Chishu Ryu. Photo: Shochiku When I saw Michael Haneke's Amour earlier this year I felt a sudden urge to pay a couple of older relatives a visit.…

The Evening Star 

In 1988, Aurora Greenway (Shirley MacLaine) has a strained relationship with her grandchildren and eventually agrees to see a therapist (Bill Paxton). The sequel to Terms of Endearment (1983) desperately…

Apollo 13: Lost Moon, Saved Lives

Bill Paxton, Kevin Bacon and Tom Hanks. Photo: Universal When producer Brian Grazer and director Ron Howard decided to turn the story about the ill-fated 1972 Apollo 13 mission into…

Dallas: Soap Opera Royalty

Steve Kanaly, Patrick Duffy, Victoria Principal, Jim Davis, Barbara Bel Geddes, Larry Hagman, Charlene Tilton and Linda Gray. Photo: CBS When we think about 1980s television, the supersoaps tend to…