[10] Writer/director John Hughes had more box office hits than you can shake a stick at, and while many of them were fun and irreverent fare (like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or Weird Science), one sticks out above the crowd — his crowning achievement: The Breakfast Club. It’s a low-concept, small-scale production — practically a filmed stage play — about five disparate teenagers who suffer …
[9] There’s this thing called the “elasticity of human emotion”, where the harder down you throw people, the higher up they’ll rise. I haven’t seen many movies demonstrate this principle better than The Color Purple. Whoopi Goldberg plays Celie, who we see having two children by her own father before being married off to Mister (Danny Glover), who beats her and convinces her she is …
[10] Straight biographies rarely make great film, but by filtering the subject through another man’s envy, director Milos Forman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) delivers one of the best bio-films I’ve ever seen. This isn’t a film about a composer and his music (how boring would that be?) — it’s a film about an insanely jealous contemporary named Salieri. Salieri, played brilliantly by F. …
[9] “As boys, they said they would die for each other. As men, they did.” Once Upon a Time in America is an epic, gorgeous, emotionally moving gangster flick from spaghetti western maestro Sergio Leone (The Good the Bad and the Ugly). Robert DeNiro stars as ‘Noodles’, a former Prohibition-era gangster returning to Lower-East Manhattan after thirty-five years in self-imposed exile over the deaths of …
[10] In Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster classic, a young boy named Elliot (Henry Thomas) takes care of a stranded alien, helping him send a message into space for the mother ship to return and rescue him. E.T. is about loneliness and friendship. While E.T. has been physically left behind, Elliot and his family — Robert MacNaughton and Drew Barrymore play siblings and Dee Wallace plays the …
[10] Robert Redford directs this adaptation of Judith Guest’s novel, about a family reeling from the accidental death of the eldest child. Unlike so many dramas, it’s what you don’t see and what isn’t said that makes Ordinary People such a gut-wrenching, powerfully moving film. Timothy Hutton, Donald Sutherland, and Mary Tyler Moore give superb performances as family members struggling to reconnect with one another …
[8] Brad Davis (Querelle, Chariots of Fire) stars in this true story about an American named Billy Hayes who was sent to a dehumanizing Turkish prison for trying to smuggle hash over the border. Originally sentenced to four years, Hayes learned just 53 days before his parole that the Turkish government upped his term to a minimum of 30 years. While his girlfriend and family …
[9] Sylvester Stallone wrote and stars in this low-budget box office triumph that went on to win the Best Picture Academy Award. Rocky is a remarkable blend of fantastic performances, understated screenwriting, and straightforward execution. It’s very hard not to get swept up in the characters’ hopes and dreams. There are a couple of incredible scenes that really seal the deal for me. One is …
[10] A suicidal TV news anchorman strikes a nerve with the public, prompting his network to bastardize their news hour with his crackpot proselytizing. Before long, the network embraces pure tabloid sensationalism — live assassinations and all. Network is now famous for being ahead of its time, foretelling the Jerry Springer and Honey Boo Boo phenomenons decades in advance. But there’s more to it than …
[9] Chinatown is the name of the movie, but only a short final scene takes place there. One could argue the film is a journey to its namesake, but even that’s not enough to explain the title. In a rare intimate scene in the film, Jack Nicholson tells Faye Dunaway about his time as a cop working in Chinatown. He tried to help a woman, …
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