|Ben Jarman| In 1928, Anna May Wong said “No!” to Hollywood. Before leaving Tinseltown, she made an unmistakable name for herself, taking on supporting roles that would often overshadow the lead actors and actresses. With that fame, Wong received constant attention from the… Continue reading
|Matt Lambert| In 2013, I was taking my first-ever film studies course. It was a course on Melodramas and our introductory film was the Douglas Sirk, 1956 classic (and a mainstay on my Letterbox Top Four) Written on the Wind. Rock Hudson plays a working-class, intellectual who works for… Continue reading
|Matthew Christensen| If you are a Gen-Xer like me, your first introduction to Dame Angela Lansbury was probably not through her phenomenal stage career, nor her remarkable film appearances. No, your first introduction to Lansbury was through her work as the pragmatic, somewhere… Continue reading
|John Blair| It has been over 30 years since I first saw Legend as a child. I retained strong memories of certain images: the magical light of the opening scenes, the oversized horns of the Lord of Darkness, the fact that there was definitely a unicorn in the movie. I knew it starred Tom Cruise, Continue reading
|Courtney Kowalke| What is the first movie you remember seeing Tim Curry in? It is a question of when you first saw him in something, not if you have ever seen him in something. The British actor has been an inescapable presence on the silver screen since 1975. Incidentally, Continue reading
|Hannah Baxter| Kinji Fukasaku and Shinichi “Sonny” Chiba, who stars in Samurai Reincarnation (1981), collaborated regularly throughout Fukasaku’s 40-year, genre-straddling directorial career. Chiba appeared in nearly a third of Fukasaku’s output, including the first four movies… Continue reading
|Brogan Earney| In the year 1987, masculine energy was at an all-time high in cinema. Movie fans all over the country flocked to theaters to watch their heroes do the impossible. Whether it was Dutch and Dillon handshaking their way through an alien Predator… Continue reading
|Nick Kouhi| It’s easy to label Brian De Palma’s work as an extended exercise in voyeurism. But in a career spanning over half a century, the enfant terrible of the New Hollywood has transcended charges of Hitchockian pastiche with his perspicaciously (and…. Continue reading
|John Blair| Coming off a nearly ten-year run that cemented him as an almost-accidental blockbuster star, Harrison Ford faced the question of all matinee idols who reach the top: What now? Instead of latching on to an established American auteur for a period piece or solemn… Continue reading
