Great Movies
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Sidney Poitier and the Slap That Shook the World
A feature on Sidney Poitier's earth-shaking turn in In the Heat of the Night.
A feature on Sidney Poitier's earth-shaking turn in In the Heat of the Night.
The pioneering character actor always brought something extra to every project.
Go ahead and scream. No one can hear you.
A tribute to the legendary B-movie writer and director, Larry Cohen.
Scout Tafoya responds to our Movie Love Questionnaire.
A look at the latest and greatest on streaming services and Blu-ray, including Orson Welles on Criterion, "The Nice Guys," "The Jungle Book," "Me Before You" and more!
Is the director's explicit "The Canyons" the nadir of his career—or its climax?
The visceral impact that Ridley Scott's "Alien" had in 1979 can never quite be recaptured, partly because so many movies have adapted elements of its premise, design and effects over the last three decades -- from John Carpenter's remake of "The Thing" (1982) to David Cronenberg's remake of "The Fly" (1986) to "Species" (1998) and "Splice" (2009). No movie had ever looked like this. And it still works tremendously -- but let me tell you, in 1979 a major studio science-fiction/horror film that hinted darkly of interspecies rape and impregnation was unspeakably disturbing. (It got under my skin and has stayed there. We have a symbiotic relationship, this burrowing movie parasite and I. We nourish each other. I don't think Ridley Scott has even come close to birthing as subversive and compelling a creation since.)
The thing is, the filmmakers actually took out the grisly details involving just what that H.R. Giger " xenomorph" did to and with human bodies (the sequels got more graphic), but in some ways that made the horror all the more unsettling. You knew, but you didn't know. It wasn't explicitly articulated. Dallas (Tom Skerrit) just disappears from the movie. The deleted "cocoon" scene (with the haunting moan, "Kill me...") appeared later on a LaserDisc version of the film, and then was incorporated into the 2003 theatrical re-release for the first time. The deleted footage:
Welcome to a special Halloween edition of the Newsletter! Marie writes: the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise in Paris is considered one of the most beautiful cemeteries in the world, in addition to being the final resting place of many a famous name. From Édith Piaf, Sarah Bernhardt and Chopin to Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison and Georges Méliès, the well-known sleep on the tree-lined avenues of the dead and which you can now explore in a virtual 360 degree tour...
ENTER Père-Lachaise
How would I feel if I were a brown student at Miller Valley Elementary School in Prescott, Arizona? A mural was created to depict some of the actual students in the school.
Let's say I was one of the lucky ones. The mural took shape, and as my face became recognizable, I took some kidding from my classmates and a smile from a pretty girl I liked.
My parents even came over one day to have a look and take some photos to e-mail to the family. The mural was shown on TV, and everybody could see that it was me.
“You know where this movie goes?” Yaphet Kotto was asking. “It goes right past ‘On the Waterfront,' that's where it goes. Paul Shrader took that ‘Waterfront' myth and smashed it, that's what he did. I like this picture so much, I even went to see it. It's the first movie I've ever been in that I went to see.”
For Gordon Parks, the first black director in the history of the Hollywood film, it all began more than 30 years ago when he was an assistant bartender on the North Coast Limited between Chicago and Seattle.
"You know what this black woman told me today?" Yaphet Kotto said. "She said my movie was the first time in the movies she ever saw a black man take a black woman out on a date. Dinner, romantic music, the whole thing."
