Classic Movie Review from My Collection: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

A strange alien ship sits in a forest clearing. Small brown creatures rustle around in the brush. In 1982, anyone who’d seen a commercial or trailer for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial knew the story. But keeping in mind that when movies are written, filmed, and edited there is usually no concept of the marketing campaign to come, one might have surmised through this opening that it was Steven Spielberg’s follow-up to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. We all know the story now and it’s far from it. The two films are hardly even kindred spirits, so different are they in tone and execution.

25 Years Ago This Month: Empire of the Sun Movie Review

There are three images that stand out in Steven Spielberg’s WWII drama Empire of the Sun that help define the film as a coming of age and loss of innocence tale. The first is of a boy becoming separated from his parents in a throng of Chinese citizens fleeing Shanghai as the Japanese invasion begins. The second is the same boy being slapped in the face by a Chinese household servant whom he has probably spent his short life bossing around. The third and most powerful is when the boy witnesses the flash of light from the Nagasaki bomb, a moment that heralds both the boy’s passage into a new world and more grown up life and the loss of innocence of humanity, which had definitively demonstrated the ability to destroy itself.

25 Years Ago This Month: December 1987

Movie release schedules were not all that different 25 years ago. Studios saved their best films for the very end of the year, just like they do today, in order to be fresh in awards voters' minds. The result is that a lot of deserving films released earlier in the year are largely ignored. The December 1987 film releases garnered a combined total of 28 Academy Award nomination. If we add The Last Emperor, which had a limited release in late November followed by a wider December release, that makes 37 nominations spread over ten films.

In Empire of the Sun, Steven Spielberg returned to WWII, subject matter that has been at the crux of no fewer than six of the films he's directed. Christian Bale starred in the film about a boy from a wealthy British family living in Shanghai who finds himself in a Japanese internment camp after the occupation begins.

The Last Emperor Movie Review: 25 Years Ago

The Last Emperor was released in New York and Los Angeles 25 years ago last month, but received its wide release in December 1987. So I revisit the film in between the two months. Look for a new 25 Years Ago review later this month when I take a look at Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun.

What a strange film is Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor. Twenty-five years later it still has a powerful resonance. It remains a gorgeous visual piece with remarkable costumes, art direction, and set decoration. It helps that the production was given unprecedented access by the Chinese government to film in the Forbidden City. I’m not sure any set could stand in as effectively for the real thing, which is imposing with its mammoth surrounding walls and impenetrable gates that keep the young emperor locked away for all of his youth. But here is a historical epic about a man who is not a hero. He made no great impact on a way of life, or any government, or even a great number of individuals for that matter. Although the story is about the man who happened to be the last imperial ruler of the old feudal China, it is really a historical view of a China in transition to a Republic and then a Communist state, with a passive hero at its center.

Lincoln Movie Review

2300 years ago Euclid proclaimed as one of his common notions that things equal to the same thing are also equal to each other. This is a founding principle of geometry and necessary for the beginnings of modern engineering. It seems self-evident, doesn’t it? Of course Thomas Jefferson held it self-evident that all men are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights such as liberty, yet he was himself a slave owner. In Steven Spielberg’s masterful biopic Lincoln, the 16^th President and drafter of the Emancipation Proclamation tries to rely on Euclid’s notion to help him in his decisions regarding slavery that will impact the United States and the terrible Civil War that was entering its fifth bloody year.

Modern Classic Movie Review: The Silence of the Lambs

I probably saw this movie sometime when I was in high school. I was fairly familiar with it and I found it pretty damn frightening. It's not quite a horror movie in the same vein as a slasher film, but I thought it worth including because it's a variation on horror and it was part of my childhood and youth.

Click here for a list of all other films reviewed and considered for this October 2012 series of horror reviews.

The killer's gaze is turned back on the audience, turning the power structure of the horror film around.

The Silence of the Lambs turns the serial killer and slasher film genre on its head by crafting the most compelling character not as the killer whom the FBI is hunting, but as the already convicted Hannibal Lecter, who sits in a basement cell and may have crucial information to help them catch their man. More remarkable than that is that everyone remembers Lecter as this imposing and frightening villain, a role that helped Anthony Hopkins win the Best Actor Oscar, but he is on screen for all of 16 minutes. That speaks to the power of seduction that he possesses.

Horror Classic Movie Review: Poltergeist

I remember watching this quite young because it was a popular movie when I was a kid and my whole family watched it, I think. Of course, I identified with the boy in the film and I even had a tree outside my bedroom window.

Click here for a list of all other films reviewed and considered for this October 2012 series of horror reviews

My memories of Poltergeist resonate from my childhood when I was scared almost senseless by the supernatural spirits that haunt the Freeling household in a California suburb. As I watched it again many years later I realized that probably as a child I saw my own family in the Freelings. There’s Diane (JoBeth Williams), who is a housewife raising three kids: the teenaged Dana (Dominique Dunne); middle child Robbie (Oliver Robins) and the five or six year old Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke). Steven (Craig T. Nelson) is a local realtor and stalwart Dad who wants to protect his family. I must have been about Carol Anne’s age when I first saw the film. I have an older brother and sister just like she does and my parents were also in their mid-30s back then. I even had a large tree growing outside my bedroom window just to cap off the similarities.

War Horse Movie Review

Having plumbed the depths of WWII era stories, I suppose it was just a matter of time before Steven Spielberg worked his way to World War I. The source material for War Horse seems almost destined for Spielberg territory. Originally a 1982 children’s novel by Michael Morpurgo its themes include childhood dreams and lost innocence as seen through the prism of violence and the torment of war.

Interestingly, the central viewpoint is through the eyes of a thoroughbred named Joey. There is a principal human character, a teenager named Albert Narracott and played with unending earnestness and wonderment by Jeremy Irvine. The early scenes are through Albert’s eyes as he sees the foal born and follows him growing up until he’s brought to auction, where his father (Peter Mullan), a veteran of the Boer War with a bum leg and a drinking problem, overbids on him as a plough horse just to spite his wealthy landlord (David Thewlis). Emily Watson is Albert’s stalwart and sensible mother. Their livelihood in jeopardy if they can’t make their rent, Albert sets his sights on breaking Joey and having him plough a new field. And goshdarnit, wouldn’t you guess that he breaks that horse, and that horse defies the odds and miraculously ploughs that field. But bad luck strikes again and Albert’s father sells Joey to the army, readying themselves for war with Germany.

The Adventures of Tintin Movie Review: Tintin, We Welcome You to America

The opening credits of Steven Spielberg’s motion capture animation The Adventures of Tintin is probably the most exciting opening credits since the same director’s Catch Me If You Can. The title designs are similar, both based on the classic Hollywood work of Saul Bass with spritely jazz compositions by the great film composer John Williams. His Tintin opening theme highlights such instruments as are not often heard in orchestras, but which lend themselves credibly to the time period (1930s) and setting (Europe) of the “Tintin” stories. Amid the fluttering flutes, dancing clarinets and staccato brass we hear accordion, harpsichord and bells all featured prominently. It’s a sequence that offers the promise of excitement and adventure to come. It’s been a long time since I had that feeling in the first moments of a movie. Unfortunately, what followed turned out to be a slight letdown.

A.I. Artificial Intelligence Movie Review: The Meeting of Two Worlds

This review was written in July 2001 and is presented here for the first time.

The anticipation surrounding the release of A.I. Artificial Intelligence has been great because it is the melding of two minds: those of Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick – two of the most influential filmmakers of the last forty years.

Much of the interest is no doubt a result of these two men having such different approaches to filmmaking. Spielberg is the sentimentalist, always drawing the audience in to emotional (and sometimes schmaltzy) scenes, while Kubrick's films are known for their cold detachment and claustrophobia. So we watch with a keen eye as Kubrick's pet project of the last twenty years unfolds in the hands of Spielberg.

25 Years Ago This Month: December 1985

In typical movie release calendar tradition, December 1985 was packed with the studios' various prestige movies vying for awards consideration.

One such film was Runaway Train starring Jon Voight, Eric Roberts and Rebecca DeMornay. Roberts earned his one and only Oscar nomination (to date) for the film. He went on to become a trashy B-movie star. The director, Andrey Konchalovskiy, went on to later direct the wonderful Sylvester Stallone/Kurt Russell buddy copy film Tango & Cash.

The eventual Best Picture Oscar winner, Sydney Pollack's Out of Africa opened to rave reviews and went on to become the number 5 box office success for 1985, just behind...

The Ten Best Films from the All-Time Top 100 Box Office

Star Wars remains in the top ten all-time box office after 33 years

The list of the top 100 box office successes is measured only in terms of pure dollars. For this reason the list is heavily slanted in favor of more recent films. This is not only because of standard economic inflation, but also because of ticket price inflation, which generally has not matched inflation of the dollar. Star Wars remained atop the list from 1977 until it was unseated by Titanic in 1998. E.T. The Extra Terrestrial was number 2 from its 1982 release until 1998. Home Alone (released at the end of 1990 and earned a significant amount of its box office in early 1991) now sits in 45th position despite having been in the top 10 for a decade or more. In less than ten years it has dropped 35 places. That's an incredibly precipitous drop when you consider the kind of staying power older films had. But with exponential growth in ticket prices we're left with a constantly shifting list of the top box office kings.

Classic Movie Review: Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Steven Spielberg has said that if he made Close Encounters of the Third Kind today the ending would be completely different. After becoming a father himself, he could no longer conceive of a father leaving his family to embark on the great journey that Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) is about to take at the film’s end. But I think Spielberg’s mistake in such thinking is the presumption that everyone’s experience of fatherhood is identical to his own.