Frank Sinatra

What makes The Manchurian Candidate such a great film is that its themes are conceivable still today, and the formal execution of this paranoid thriller is itself remarkably modern.

A Hole in the Head … [is] thoroughly enjoyable, even if it feels something like an effortless throwaway from its key contributors.

Read our appreciation of Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven and Ocean’s Twelve here and here, respectively. * * * “I’m a goddamn American icon!” Depending on where you stand on Ocean’s Twelve, Ocean’s Thirteen represents either a group of enormously famous actors going back to salvage the goodwill they squandered in the middle entry of the franchise, or that same …

Movie stars, as we know them, are not so much dead in 2013 as much as they’re no longer making movies. Celebrity has stretched far beyond film or television; people become famous now without having accomplished much of anything, just for being at the right place at the right time, or tweeting out the right scandalous photo to set afire the comments sections at TMZ or Perez Hilton. Though movies cost more than they used to—both to make and to partake—they are less frequently headlined by a man or woman whose very presence ensures bankability. A handful of movie stars remain, yet even someone like Robert Downey, Jr. can only guarantee a movie will make back its profit and then some when he’s donned his Iron Man suit.

An often amusing and enlightening result of a film buff’s tendency to explore movies of the past is discovering how differently people behaved and understood the world and the shifting circumstances around them. After all, common sense and zeitgeists are known to change with the times.

Christian Bale demanded rewrite work be done on “Terminator: Salvation” before he took the role of John Connor, a role he insisted on rather than the character the filmmakers had in mind– “…central character Marcus Wright…at a Toronto press conference in January, he (director McG) said, “I went to see him… He reads the script …