John Carpenter

[6] Hot off her Oscar win for Network, Faye Dunaway headlines this thriller about a controversial photographer whose focus on sex and violence makes her a sensation in New York’s advertising world. Dunaway’s title character begins having visions of murder — from the killer’s direct point-of-view. One by one, models and associates in her career begin dying, stabbed in the eyes by the mysterious killer. …

[7] Jamie Lee Curtis returns to the franchise that launched her career in Halloween (same title, 40 years apart). This new film ignores every single sequel in the franchise and serves as a direct follow-up to John Carpenter’s original 1978 film. And it’s just as well, because the Halloween ‘franchise’ is shaky at best. Curtis’ teenaged babysitter from ’78 is now a gun-toting grandma whose …

[6] A 1943 Navy experiment to cloak a ship from enemy radar accidentally sends two sailors forty-one years into the future. Once they arrive in 1984, they are pursued by the military and begin suffering a mysterious illness that threatens their lives unless they can get back to 1943. Michael Paré (Eddie and the Cruisers) and Bobby Di Cicco play the sailors, and Nancy Allen (Carrie, RoboCop) plays …

[2] John Carpenter has given us a handful of gems over the years, but Ghosts of Mars is not one of them. The movie’s too exotic for its own good. It starts with some quick but tedious exposition, then plops us off in a confusing, alienating environment with little to latch onto. The story has something to do with ghosts and a bunch of leftover …

[7] The skeleton crew of an isolated police precinct battle a vengeful street gang that lay siege to the building. John Carpenter (Halloween, The Thing) writes and directs this simple, straight-forward, solidly executed action/thriller, imbuing it with his love of westerns. Carpenter creates likable characters here, particularly in the stalwart police lieutenant (Austin Stoker) and the wise-cracking prisoner (Darwin Joston), the latter of which is …

[10] This movie does two things extraordinarily well. It transports me and it terrifies me. Before anything scary even happens, director John Carpenter succeeds in creating an atmosphere of mystery and suspense that locks me into the film and chills me to the bone. The story features a group of men holed up in an Antarctic research station who discover an alien (the outer space …