Cinema is essentially a storytelling medium, so when we talk about movies and their relative merits, we often tend to focus on how well they tell their stories, or whether…

There’s no real rhyme or reason to the way I choose movies to cover for this series, and there are only seven different types of stories, so it’s probably only…

Walter Matthau turned typecasting into a virtue, making the most of his pigeonhole by using his character type to play a sneakily wide variety of roles.

In general these days when writing about pop culture, I come to praise, not to bury. Still, I find that failure is often more interesting to explore than success —…

He’ll probably always be remembered as Alex Rieger from Taxi (or, for people who aren’t enlightened enough to have loved that sitcom, as Jeff Goldblum’s dad in Independence Day), but…

In theory, it should be difficult for a filmmaker to screw up a crime story set in Florida.

There are some very good things about not dying young — chief among them getting to have the experience of, you know, not dying young — but as I was…

No matter how much of a sure thing it might appear to be, every creative endeavor is a gamble. It can involve the greatest artistic minds in its medium, it…

The film industry pumps out a lot of movies every year — you could go blind trying to patch up all the blind spots in your viewing — and yet…

I’ll do just about anything to avoid having to listen to Jimmy Buffett’s music.

I don’t have it anymore so I can’t prove this if anyone comes asking for it, but in the press kit for Toots Thielemans’ 1992 album The Brasil Project, there’s…