The Popcorn Champs

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…

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…

It took five years to get the Ghostbusters back on screen. 1984’s Ghostbusters had struck gold, capturing public…

Somebody should’ve been chasing Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise. They should’ve accidentally stolen a shipment of…

The best Star Trek movie is a comedy. In 1986’s Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, the crew of the USS Enterprise…

Midway through Top Gun, the highest-grossing movie of 1986, there’s a scene where the film briefly abandons all…

“Sir, do we get to win this time?” That’s John Rambo, talking to his old mentor Colonel Trautman, at the beginning…

There’s a brief moment early in Beverly Hills Cop where Axel Foley, a resourceful and gleefully disrespectful young…

Eight years after the official end of the Vietnam War, George Lucas turned the Viet Cong into adorable teddy bears…

“The basic ecology of Hollywood is, I’m very much afraid, radically changing.” This was William Goldman,…

The plane has just exploded. Indiana Jones and Marion Ravenwood have killed about a dozen Nazi soldiers and escaped.…