Bill Bria

It's not entirely clear who wrote or spoke the famous quote, "From the sublime to the ridiculous there is but one step." For all intents and purposes, it may as well have been coined by writer/director John Hughes, who throughout his career displayed a mastery of that very principle.
Hughes had a particular knack for inserting ridiculous elements in his films, letting the surreal creep into scenes with such fluidity that their outrageousness only stands out upon reflection. His most ridiculou...

The notion of a "zombie apocalypse" has been popular for the past few decades, and the irony is that just such an event has happened within pop culture. After all, zombies are everywhere — books, long-running television shows, board games, video games, action figures, apparel, and, of course, the movies.
Yet this wasn't always the case. In fact, just 40-odd years ago, the zombie was still the near-exclusive purview of the filmmaker who defined the creature with 1968's "Night of the Living Dea...

Most actors would rather forget their first movies, whether due to the type of film they appeared in or their work within them. Yet, some have the good fortune to not only give an excellent performance the first time out of the gate, but deliver it inside a movie that becomes enormously influential to future legendary artists.
That's precisely the case for Matt Dillon and the first film he starred in, 1979's "Over the Edge." The movie, which sees Dillon as one of the disaffected and mistreate...

Satire is one of the hardest forms of comedy to do, let alone do it well. If done too subtly, it can come off as thinly-veiled sincerity, with the label of "satire" becoming a bit of a smokescreen. If done too broadly, it can either miss its target entirely or rob its critical observations of their power.
Threading the needle between mockery and sincerity is so key to making an effective and powerful satire, and that's something director David Fincher is well aware of. Since the beginning of ...

One of the most beguiling aspects of 1993's "Groundhog Day" is the way Phil Connors (Bill Murray) becomes trapped inside a time loop, the rules of which are never entirely explained. While the film works brilliantly as a comedy and character study of the arrogant and self-centered Connors learning how to be a better man, Phil learns those lessons by literally being left to his own devices, struggling through trial and error to stop living through February 2 over and over again.
Part of the co...

As the old aphorism goes, "fake it till you make it." While the usefulness of the axiom is highly debatable, it does seem to genuinely work for some folks, provided they apply it in the right place at the right time.
For director Paul W.S. (don't call him Thomas) Anderson, the right place and the right time happened to be Hollywood in the mid-'90s. A filmmaker who had just moved to the United States after leaving his home in Northern England, Anderson needed to find a way to jump-start his ca...

Rob Zombie's "Halloween II" is arguably the musician-turned-movie director's best film to date. A singular entry among the already varied 12 existing movies in the "Halloween" franchise (soon to become 13 with the release of "Halloween Ends" this fall), "Halloween II" distills nearly everything great about Zombie's work in the horror genre into one movie: haunting surrealism, uncompromising brutality, grime-soaked characters, crass humor, and raw emotion.
Ironically, such a unique gift of a m...

Stephen King does not mince words when it comes to movies adapted from his novels. Indeed, the prolific author is famously a vocal critic of Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining," a film that is widely regarded as one of the greatest horror movies ever made. King undeniably has his reasons for dismissing it, however, and even the most staunch fan of Kubrick's film can understand where King is coming from.
Less understandable is King's on-the-record distaste for director Mark L. Lester and producer ...

he science-fiction author and futurist Arthur C. Clarke proposed three adages, or “laws”, in his 1962 essay “Profiles of the Future.” The third of these laws holds that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Clarke wasn’t merely thinking of the potential for the existence of extraterrestrials or the supernatural; he was observing how humanity’s own technological progress moves so rapidly that our society and morals take a much longer time to catch up to it, un...

In 1984, Sting was practically a household name. His band, The Police, had released their last studio album titled Synchronicity a year earlier in 1983, and that album included such chart-topping singles as "Wrapped Around Your Finger," "King of Pain," and the immortal "Every Breath You Take," with the video for the latter in heavy rotation on MTV.
The man also known as Gordon Sumner was no stranger to the cinema screen, either — beginning his acting career in 1979's "Quadrophenia," he appear...

In casting films and television shows that are set in the recent past, there exists a tacit understanding that the actors and characters are separate entities. For instance, "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood" doesn't have to go out of its way to explain a resemblance between Kurt Russell's character of Randy and a kid named Kurt Russell starring in a little film called "The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes," which was released in 1969, the year "Hollywood" is set.
Yet when a movie or show involves c...

"Raiders of the Lost Ark" is, among other things, one of the greatest collections of pulp adventure tropes in a single movie. Director Steven Spielberg and producer/co-writer George Lucas, deliberately making an homage to the adventure films and movie serials of their youth, stuffed as many exciting ideas and elements into the movie as they could: bullwhip fu, gritty fisticuffs, Nazi's getting owned, boulder chases, car chases, a literal Deus ex Machina, and of course, snakes — lots of snakes...

By the time director Michael Mann's crime drama-cum-biopic "Public Enemies" was released in 2009, the cinematic medium had existed for a full century. As a result, historical events lived in the public consciousness more than just in firsthand memories from those still living who experienced them; such memories of events had become superseded by films depicting them. In other words, the look of World War II had become synonymous with the look of a '40s movie, Vietnam and Watergate evoked imag...

The end of "Stranger Things" season 3 left the citizens of Hawkins, Indiana adrift both figuratively and literally (and in the case of David Harbour's Jim Hopper, very, very literally). With the "Dungeons & Dragons" party scattered and a little shattered, the future for the characters in season 4 would seem precarious enough.
Of course, that means they'll find themselves forced to deal with not just the return of shenanigans from the extradimensional "Upside Down," but a brand new major villa...

1979's "Meatballs" is part of the wave of ribald, anarchic comedies to come out of the late '70s and early '80s in the wake of shows like "NBC's Saturday Night" and movies like "National Lampoon's Animal House." These comedies would often have an anarchic air about them, seen in their transgressive humor as well as their plot structure, which typically emphasized a "slobs vs. snobs" conflict. So it's no surprise that the sets of these productions would tend to get a little out of control.
How...