In the sequel-mad ’80s (every bit as bad as we have it today, hard as that may be to believe), it was surely not a surprise that something as successful as National Lampoon’s Vacation would generate a quick follow-up, and indeed it took but two years for National Lampoon’s European Vacation to come out. Now […]

There’s nothing that’s not lazy about the statement “they didn’t need to remake X”, because the fact of the matter is that they did (or maybe they didn’t but then you’re just being weird to complain about it), and you can either whine or deal with the thing that now exists. Still and all, they […]

I would like to take credit for calling Abduction, the first feature headlined by soul-crushingly generic teenage hunk Taylor Lautner, by the alternate title Abs-duction. Sadly, I cannot, for it isn’t mine, but was given me by a friend who is welcome to claim it in comments. I have shared it with you not because […]

The right thing is to first begin with the horrible admission, and it is that I was 29 years and 9 months and 7 days old the very first time that I saw John Hughes’s iconic teensploitation picture The Breakfast Club, which happens to have been the day before writing this review. I bring this […]

“Samantha Baker is turning sixteen and she’s fallen in love for the first time. It should be the best time of her life. “But… her family is so preoccupied with her sister’s wedding they totally forget her birthday, the boy she loves doesn’t know she exists and the class clown is putting the make on […]

In Drive, Albert Brooks plays Bernie Rose, a former movie producer turned mobster in Los Angeles (the film refrains, but only barely, from making the joke that those two occupations are the same thing), who at one point quietly reflects upon his former career. “The critics called them ‘European'” he says (or close enough). “I […]

In determining which films deserved a slot in the “Hughes as Screenwriter” portion of this blog’s John Hughes retrospective, my initial thought was that Nate and Hayes would be the first title that it made perfect sense to skip over. It was the first Hughes screenplay that was written in collaboration, with David Odell (whose […]

With Drive making its much-anticipated US debut this weekend, I thought it was a good time to finally acquaint myself with the cultishly adored films with which director Nicolas Winding Refn made his reputation. One of the more storied debuts of the 1990s came in 1996, when 25-year-old Nicolas Winding Refn of Denmark shocked and […]

Of the three films John Hughes wrote in 1983, Mr. Mom proved that he could write a big, Zeitgeisty hit, but his next effort (which premiered a whole week later in July of that year) was almost certainly the more impressive achievement. For one thing, it was almost as successful as Mr. Mom – $61 […]

The boxing movie is the most durable of all sports subgenres, despite being by no means the most popular of sports. My private belief is that this is because boxing is the sport that best allows for individual narratives, rather than stories of teamwork (and it is customarily the case that American cinema does better […]

The acrid tang of National Lampoon’s Class Reunion didn’t hang over John Hughes’s career for very long: barely more than a year after that film’s miserable clonk at the box office, the writer already had seen three more of his scripts turned hit the big screen to significantly better results: two of them ended up […]

Over the years, director Steven Soderbergh has established himself as something of a chameleon: social dramas, biopics, epics, caper films, action movies, satire of the political and non-political varieties, he’s done them all, always with a stylistic flourish on the material that could come from no other filmmaker, and to my mind, he’s done them […]