Fatal Attraction: Lock Up Your Pets
Glenn Close and Michael Douglas. Photo: Paramount Modern audiences might find it hard to understand why this film was such a hit in the late 1980s, but that's to be…
Caché: In Denial
Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche. Photo: Les Films du Losange When I started watching Caché, I was wary. I knew that director Michael Haneke had no qualms about torturing his…
The Stepford Wives: Accept No Substitute
Katharine Ross. Photo: Columbia Screenwriter William Goldman was less than happy about director Bryan Forbes’s lack of integrity. The filmmaker had cast his wife, Nanette Newman, as one of the…
No Country for Old Men: Blood in the Sand
Javier Bardem. Photo: Miramax When I started reading Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road”, it took a while before I was hooked, until the author’s way of conjuring a desolate, bleak future…
Final Destination 3
As Wendy Christensen (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and friends are about to take a roller coaster ride, she has a premonition of a major accident and they decide not to take…
Final Destination 2
After having a vision where she dies in a violent highway pileup, Kimberly Corman (A.J. Cook) and a few others narrowly escape death... but then the strange accidents begin. The…
The Wicker Man
Cop Edward Malus (Nicolas Cage) goes to a small Washington island to look for a missing girl; what he finds is an isolated, mysterious community ruled by women. Director Neil…
From Hell: The Ripper Unmasked (Again)
Johnny Depp. Photo: 20th Century Fox When I was 16 years old, I wrote a paper on Jack the Ripper. I suspect my teacher worried about my choice of subject,…
Rear Window: A View to a Kill
James Stewart. Photo: Paramount This masterpiece from Alfred Hitchcock reunited the director with James Stewart from Rope (1948), another thriller that was set entirely in one apartment. This film has…
North by Northwest: Rushmore Rumble
Cary Grant. Photo: MGM According to one biography on Alfred Hitchcock, it was Bernard Herrmann who introduced screenwriter Ernest Lehman to the director. They hit it off and decided to…