In the beginning there was Helen Gibson. Gibson was a rodeo star in the early days of the 20th century who moved to Hollywood to become a “cowboy extra” and ended up becoming one of the very first paid stunt women/actresses in the history of the movies when she was hired to perform stunts and…
In writer-director Jim Akin’s The Ocean of Helena Lee, the first thing you may notice about 12-year-old Helena Lee (and the young actress, Moriah Blonna, who plays her) is the diverting mole on the left side of her chin, the sort of punctuation which amplifies the beauty of the face which it interrupts– a face which…
Every time I step into a warehouse discount store I can see about 11 different reasons to not get excited about the prospect of buying a 3D big-screen TV. Display monitor after display monitor blasts out images from the latest superhero franchise or frenetic animated epic to have made its bow on Blu-ray, each of…
Another year, my sixth at the TCM Classic Film Festival, is in the books, and I’m exhausted! Fourteen movies over four days sounds like a lot, and it is– though compared to past years, when I saw as many as 17 and 18, it was a relatively laid-back schedule. But you don’t just sit in…
Starting today, it’s down the rabbit hole once again to revel in Hollywood’s past glories (and international cinema’s too) at the 2015 TCM Classic Film Festival, unspooling March 26-29. This is the sixth incarnation of the festival, and I have been honored– and downright lucky– to have been able to attend each of those, thanks…
Anthology films, by their very nature, suggest a mixed bag of experience, perspective and, sometimes, even thematic concern, and their history is, like the form itself, all over the place. Alberto Cavalcanti’s Dead of Night (1945) helped cement the anthology approach as a tradition of the horror genre, and the British production company Amicus continually…
In 1978 I was a college student majoring in film studies, as well as a mid-lapse Catholic, so the ripples of flabbergasted embarrassment I could conjure over the enjoyment of mainstream studio-sanctioned trash, to say nothing of the nagging sense that I should have instead been watching a Truffaut or a Fassbinder movie, or poring…
Another movie-mad installment from Dennis Cozzalio, this week tackling Gunnar Hansen’s memoir on the making of that out-of-control horror classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. To dig deeper into Dennis’s brain visit his terrific site, Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule. The true story of the making of one of the most influential horror…
The first Oscar show I ever saw was the 42nd annual gala, honoring the movies of 1969. Of course I hadn’t seen any of them—even True Grit hadn’t made it to our local “show house” yet, and the likes of Midnight Cowboy and Z never would. But I was aware of all of them, thanks…
We’re excited to announce a new feature here at TFH, a weekly column from one of our favorite writers on film, Dennis Cozzalio. Dennis has been delighting movie fans for years over at his own blog, Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule and now he’s settling in for a weekly gig here on our…