Family has always been a core value for Francis Ford Coppola and his family—his father as well as his children—has usually been part of his filmmaking. He met his wife Eleanor on the set of his first movie, Dementia 13 (1962), where she was assistan

Genghis Khan’s birthright was to captain a small, nomadic tribe across the grassy sea of Mongolia. He grew up and made a bid for the whole world. He conquered as far as his eyes could see, Central Asia, portions of China, Persia and Russia. His name

Westerns were never my favorite film genre, but I find the movies easy to settle into. I’m not alone. Maybe they are cinematic comfort food for people who remember when westerns were always on TV as they were growing up. Even today, if I stumble across

The success of Sex, Lies, and Videotape and Reservoir Dogs gave rise in the ‘90s to an “independent” film movement on the environs of Hollywood. The indie inspiration continues in recent films such as Juno and NoCountry for Old Men, with “independent” s

Starting with Toy Story, Pixar Studio has produced the best animated feature films for mainstream audiences since the days when Walt Disney was young. Pixar’s animation was always fluid and executed with pioneering technology, but that would matter less

“Existence? Well, what does it matter?” asks Ian Curtis at the opening of Control. “The past is now part of the future. The present is well out of hand.” By this time his grip on the present had so weakened that he killed himself on the eve of

Why Hate Hollywood? For starters, the town is run nowadays by people who don’t know much about movies and don’t especially like them. The town? Hollywood isn’t so much a place anymore, though a lot of its infrastructure remains in Los Angeles, but a st

Would you believe they finally got around to making “Get Smart” into a movie? Would you believe they tried it once before? Well, scarcely anyone remembers The Nude Bomb (1980), starring Don Adams as Maxwell Smart, the bumbling spy struggling to

Are we formed by genetics or environment—“that whole nature versus nurture thing”—as the Alan Alda character in Flirting With Disaster might put it? The Miramax comedy, directed by David O. Russell (ThreeKings), was one of my Top 10 movies the year it w

In his novel The Terror, Arthur Machen imagined that the animals, sickened by the carnage of World War I, turned on humankind with tooth and claw. Later, Daphne DuMaurier in a story adapted by Alfred Hitchcock thought the birds might strike at peo