The Popcorn Champs

It’s been more than a decade since a wholly original film was the biggest hit of its year. All our reigning…

Film culture, especially popular film culture, moves in fits and starts. There’s a lot of money on the line, and the…

The three part threes all arrived in May of 2007, one after the other after the other. First weekend in May: Spider-M…

By most estimates, 2011’s Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides is the most expensive motion picture ever…

In the fall of 2012, the Walt Disney Company dropped a four-billion-dollar bag of money on George Lucas’ desk and…

Shrek was a “fuck you.” That was the entire point. This massively successful children’s film franchise owes its…

“Fantasy is the one genre that’s never been done especially well,” Peter Jackson told The Los Angeles Times. “After…

The bus is a carnival of humiliation. The driver won’t stop, so Peter Parker has to run alongside, banging on the…

There was always going to be a Harry Potter movie franchise. As soon as the first J.K. Rowling novel ascended the New…

For most of his life, Theodor Geisel, the children’s author who used the name Dr. Seuss, wouldn’t license his books…

People applauded a logo. I’d never seen that before. When the word “Lucasfilm” shimmered across the screen, my…

In November 1997, Tom Hanks and Ben Affleck were in The New York Times Magazine together. On the cover, the two of…

It’s the string quartet that really gets me. The passengers are running around, screaming, doing everything they can…

Every city has the place where the punks go, that anodyne strip of sidewalk where the sneery disaffected kids…

You shouldn’t be able to make great art by committee. A great work of art is supposed to be made by one person…

When my wife was a teenager, she had to wear a name tag that read “Gump.” At her place of work, everyone did. She…

About 20 minutes into Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg captures perhaps the greatest Spielberg Face ever put on film.…

Imagine being the person who has to dig through hours upon hours of tape of Robin Williams riffing. Someone had to:…

For someone who’s been in movies for the past 50 years, Arnold Schwarzenegger has never really been an actor.…

Imagine it’s 1990 and you’re Joe Pesci. You’ve had a solid career as a character actor for a decade. You have one…