Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator II: Judgment Day Chris Forrester articulates how James Cameron films like Terminator II and Aliens work so well as sequels with established iconography and higher stakes than their predecessors. James Cameron has conquered quite a few things through his nearly 40 years in Hollywood — among them the blockbuster, the epic… Read more »
A stranger comes knocking in Oddity (Mc Carthy, 2024) Chris Forrester considers how 2024’s eerie and unexpected Oddity fits within the landscape of recent horror films. Nearly every year in recent memory has yielded one or two horror movies subjected to a repetitive, now-familiar cycle of discourse: fanatic pre-release hype, a marketing campaign that plays… Read more »
The Others (Amenábar, 2001) Chris Forrester describes the magic of Nicole Kidman’s performances, particularly her star-defining string of films from 1995 to 2005. One of the more remarkable decades in any recent performer’s career is Nicole Kidman’s turn-of-the-millennium output, a thrillingly versatile stretch of outings that took her from newly minted breakout star on the… Read more »
A cab barrels through the amber Los Angeles night In honor of its 20th anniversary this month, Chris Forrester dives into the Michael Mann thriller Collateral, the first film to really foreground the digital style that has defined the filmmaker’s career since. While for the majority of filmgoers, the transition from film to digital might… Read more »
Still from Rio Bravo Chris Forrester details how Rio Bravo exemplifies the term of “the hangout film” with its affable characters, softened masculinity, atypical genre tropes, and more. The films of Howard Hawks offer a sampling of many of the cinema’s great genre pleasures — film noirs, musicals, westerns, dramas, comedies, romances, war films. Were… Read more »
A corpse drifts to the bottom of a river in The Night of the Hunter Chris Forrester considers the powerful legacy of 1955’s The Night of the Hunter, a nightmare-fueled noir with far-reaching iconography and themes. There are films you can almost see without seeing. Famous images, lines of dialogue, and plot points from films… Read more »