We saw almost all of them in theaters. Of course these things are subjective, so please let us know if you think we missed something.

And now, onto the '90s movies.

Kids (1995)

It's hard to oversell how worked up some people were about Kids in 1995, because of how bluntly the film portrayed sex and drugs.

It's a rarity among coming-of-age '90s movies in that it isn't focused on a high school — because its characters spend all their time on the street, in parks, in bodegas, in houses where parents aren't home, doing things they shouldn't be doing.

Directed by Larry Clark, and written by Harmony Korine when he was barely older than his teenage subjects, Kids helped launch the career of two of the most iconic Gen X actresses, Chloe Sevigny and Rosario Dawson (above). It also has one of the most excellent soundtracks ever, anchored by Folk Implosion's "Natural One."

By the way, that thing Chloe Sevigny is using in the photo? That's a public phone. People used to scrounge for change for the privilege of sharing a dirty phone. Whenever people tell you everything was better in the '90s, consider that this was a common method of contacting your friends.

Pump Up the Volume (1990)

Christian Slater plays a pre-internet edgelord who uses a pirate radio station to vent his teen angst and play some cool rebellious music.

LIving in a Phoenix suburb, he's known by day as Mark, a bookish high school student who struggles to make friends. But at night, he becomes Hard Harry, a kind of Gen X shock jock who rails against parental hypocrisy and unleashes the full fury of... Leonard Cohen?

That musical selection is one of many tip-offs that Harry is secretly a sensitive soul, driven more by sadness than rage. Pump Up the Volume is one of the most fascinating '90s movies because it felt almost instantly dated once the internet came into wide use — no one needed a pirate radio signal anymore to share their uncensored thoughts.

But it's hard not to see a blueprint for our modern lives, in which we sometimes behave one way in the real world, and another online.

Freeway (1996)

If you think of Reese Witherspoon mostly as a producer-star of inoffensive rom-coms family dramas, go see Freeway, and buckle in. A very dark, very '90s retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, it's one of our favorite mostly forgotten '90s dark comedies — and the '90s was maybe the best decade for dark comedies.

Witherspoon plays an illiterate runaway, fleeing from the authorities after the arrest of her sex worker mom and abusive stepdad, who somehow lands in an even worse situation when she accepts a ride on her way to her grandmother's house. She's been targeted, it turns out, by Big Bad Wolf, aka Bob Wolverton, a creep played by a vanity-free Kiefer Sutherland.

Their loaded supporting cast includes Den Hedaya, Amanda Plummer, Brooke Shields, Bokeem Woodbine and Brittany Murphy. Wow.

It was produced by Oliver Stone, because of course it was.

Also Read: 12 Shameless '90s Comedies That Just Don't Care If You're Offended

Can't Hardly Wait (1998)

Is Can't Hardly Wait a Gen X movie, or millennial movie? It's stacked with Gen X rising or soon-to-be stars, including Ethan Embry, Lauren Ambrose, Seth Green, Melissa Joan Hart and of course Jennifer Love Hewitt (above), who anchors the whole thing.

And while the soundtrack is very Gen X — it's named for a Replacements song, and features showstopping needle drops by Run-DMC and Guns N Roses — the characters are right on the blurry line between two generations, at the end of a relatively carefree decades for suburban teens. They don't know it, but they're about to enter a much scarier decade and world.

It's one of the most breezy and fun '90s movies, taking its cues from '80s teen movies. But it's also fascinating. We think about Can't Hardly Wait all the time when we think about the years when you're relatively free of responsibility, and all the problems you make for yourself as you set out into the world.

Its writers-directors, Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont, also made a terrific Gen X satire that's on our list of Smart Movies Disguised as Dumb Movies.

Dazed and Confused (1993)

A similar question: Is Dazed and Confused a Baby Boomer movie? Or a Gen X movie? It's stacked with Gen X actors, from Ben Affleck to Parker Posey to Matthew McConaughey, but is set on the last day of school in 1976, arguably Baby Boomer territory.

Richard Linklater, who wrote and directed the film, was inspired by his own Texas youth. Born in 1960, and a Gen X icon since the news media seized on his 1990 film Slacker to help define a generation, he isn't sure what generation he falls into.

"We called oursvelves Busters," Linklater told MovieMaker in 2022. "We were the end of the boom, beginning of Gen X."

Whatever the case, he took the wisdom of the past and the energy of the future to make a timeless movie that resonates across decades. McConaughey's reprehensible but hilarious line about high school students perfectly captures the paradox of movies: We get older, the movies that raised us stay the same.

Hangin' With the Homeboys (1991)

A lot of '90s movies present an America that is mostly white, suburban, and affluent. The main characters of Hangin' With the Homeboys are well outside that demo, and the film provided a fun, smart, endearing look at a quartet of four young men from the Bronx, two Black and two Puerto Rican, who go looking for a night of fun and end up confronting their futures.

Directed by Joseph Vasquez, it has a light touch and a stellar cast including Mario Joyner, Doug E. Doug, Nestor Serrano and John Leguizamo. Critically acclaimed, it missed with audiences but later got plenty of VHS play.

Quentin Tarantino has said one of the best things about Dazed and Confused is that you feel like you're hanging out with the characters, and that's very true of Hangin' With the Homeboys, too.

Election (1999)

There was something incredibly funny and profound about seeing Ferris Bueller himself, Matthew Broderick, turn into one of those teachers Ferris tormented. Adding to the joys of Election is that he isn't bedeviled by a slacker or rebel, but by the most type A of achievers, Tracy Flick, played to perfection by Reese Witherspoon.

Election is one of those high school movies we're almost everyone is smarter than they let on and no one is as nice, or naive, as they seem. Is it possible to make a movie that feels as dark as actual high school? Director Alexander Payne, working off the novel by Tom Perrotta, proved it was very possible.

We're also very excited for the adaptation of Perrotta's 2022 election sequel, Tracy Flick Can't Win, a novel that found the now-adult Flick in the unenviable position of high school administrator.

Romeo + Juliet (1996)

"You can do that?" was the frequent reaction to Baz Luhrmann's brazenly 90s — but surprisingly faithful — adaptation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

Dispensing with old costumes and settings to put his star-crossed lovers (Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes) in hyper-modern (for the time) Verona Beach, he made the bold and daring decision to barely touch The Bard's dialogue. Or, even more daringly, to go for long stretches without it.

Thanks to the music of Des'ree, The Cardigans, and many more, this is an utterly intoxicating movie, especially if you happened to be a 90s teenager in love. Not every song still works, but the ones that do — most notably Des'ree's "Kissing You" — really do.

Empire Records (1995)

The story of a record store perhaps on the brink of sale to a corporate chain, Empire Records is a time capsule of a time when "selling out" was recognized as a bad thing. It boasted an irresistible cast, including Ethan Embry, Debi Mazar, Rory Cochrane, Renée Zellweger, and Liv Tyler, as well as an even more irresistible song in Edwyn Collin's '60s/'90s mashup "A Girl Like You."

It failed miserably at the box office — Variety brutally called it "a soundtrack in search of a movie" — but has since become a cult classic. Sometimes a soundtrack (and a bevy of future stars) is enough. Is it a '90s movie that was too true to itself? Or one of those '90s movies that felt too in the zeitgeist?

Also, for people who weren't around in the 90s: "Selling out" was the concept of abandoning the things that made you or your art cool in order to make money. It's what we're doing at this very moment by writing photo galleries instead of making four-track demos in our bedroom.

Cruel Intentions (1999)

At a time when 18-year-olds are routinely infantilized, this movie feels like all kinds of wrong — but we love it. What sick genius thought of remaking Pierre Choderlos de Laclos' 1782 novel Les Liaisons dangereuses with a bunch of high schoolers?

The credit goes to Gen X writer-director Roger Kumble, who gave a clearinghouse of Gen X actors – notably Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippe and Selma Blair — their first shot at darker, more grown-up roles. (Reese Witherspoon was already an old hand at this thing, having broken out with the aforementioned Freeway.)

The movie artfully manages to be extremely dirty without being explicit, a smart line-trading given that it was targeted at people the same age as the characters.

And it inspired a 2024 revamp, because of course it did.

Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995)

Speaking of lines: Todd Solondz seems to live for laying down challenges some audiences will just refuse to cross, and his indie classic Welcome to the Dollhouse was one of the first to make that clear. (At one point the movies title was F-----s and R-----s, two words everyone who was every on an elementary-school playground in the 1980s heard an awful lot.)

Another product of the '90s movies indie boom, Welcome to the Dollhouse was the breakout for Heather Matarazzo, who plays the unpopular Dawn "Wiener Dog" Wiener, a girl so desperate for contact she agrees to meet up with another kid who threatens to assault her. Things only get darker from there.

But Solondz's next film, the stunning Happiness, went even further.

The Craft (1996)

Teeming with style and a don't-talk-about-it-just-do-it brand of girl power, The Craft became a surprise 1996 hit, even if it paled in cultural impact to the other big 1996 Neve Campbell high school horror movie, Scream.

A sequel to The Craft came and went in 2020, which wasn't, let's be honest, the best year to release a movie. But the original still holds up spectacularly, especially its blunt, ahead-of-its time take on bullying.

The cast, meanwhile, is spectacular, including Fairuza Balk, Robin Tunney, Rachel True, Christine Taylor and Campbell's Scream castmate, Skeet Ulrich. Just watch it. It's one of the teen '90s movies that holds up the best.

Wild Things (1998)

A delightfully twisty high school noir with as many dark surprises as a swamp, the Florida-set Wild Things features Denise Richards and Neve Campbell as very different high school students who get involved in a very complex situation we don't want to reveal too much about here.

It flirts with being exactly the right kind of exploitive trash, but it's equal opportunity exploitive thanks to a wonderfully gratuitous scene involving Kevin Bacon.

The stellar cast also includes Matt Dillon and Bill Murray. Some people may clutch your pearls throughout Wild Things, but no one will be able to deny being shockingly entertained.

Liked This List of 90s Movies Only Cool Kids Remember?

If you like '90s movies, perhaps we can also interest you in this list of 80s Movies Only Cool Kids Remember or the video version of Awesome '90s Movies Only Cool Kids Remember.

Main image: The Craft. Columbia Pictures.

Editor's Note: Corrects main image.

But first: We're only writing about the No. 2 film in a series — not the third or fourth or whatever. The second film is crucial because if it doesn't prove that the original's story is worthy of expansion, any potential franchise can die right there A bad sequel can even make you like the original less.

So the following movie sequels better than the originals — which made us appreciate the first film even more — are especially praiseworthy.

The Godfather Part 2 (1974)

Lots of people think it's impossible to choose between the first two Godfather films, and we hear them. But we place Part 2 slightly above Part 1 because of the incredible backstory of Vito Corleone (played here by Robert De Niro). And because the grim interplay between Michael (Al Pacino) and Fredo (John Cazale) is so devastating.

For what it's worth, it received six Oscars compared to three for the original — including a best director Oscar that the Academy gave Francis Ford Coppola for the second film, but not the first. And they both won Best Picture.

If you prefer the first Godfather, we're not going to argue with you. Both films are as close to perfect as a film can get.

Mad Max 2 aka The Road Warrior (1981)

After the first Mad Max showed the collapse of society, Mad Max 2 — released in the U.S. as The Road Warrior — could devote itself entirely to imagining life in a wasteland. Director George Miller and young star Mel Gibson delivered a grotesque, vicious, grounded war where gasoline is more valuable than human life.

With a much higher budget than Miller had for Mad Max, it could indulge in the stunning set pieces that the Mad Max films have become known for — and that Miller perfected in 2015's Mad Max: Fury Road.

And despite its unimpressive showing at the box office. he at least rivaled many of the previous films with the excellent Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga last year.

Also Read: 13 Shameless '90s Comedies That Just Don't Care If You're Offended

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

Another of the greatest sequels ever made. As we've previously noted, the original Terminator — a relatively low-budget movie that had only modest box office returns, before finding a vast home audience.

Judgment Day turned everything up. Sarah Connor, a terrified waitress in the first Terminator, is now a hardened warrior trying to save her son and prevent the apocalypse. And Arnold Schwarzenegger's T-800 is back not as an unstoppable killing machine, but as a reluctant hero.

The actions sequence are stupendous, Robert Patrick is brilliant as the shape-shifting T-1000, and the film has more emotion than anything else James Cameron has ever made, with the possible exception of Titanic. It's a titanic achievment.

Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan (1981)

Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a return to the Star Trek universe after the cancellation of the beloved TV series, was fine. It's a little slow and short on action, and got mixed reviews, but at least our old friends were back.

But Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, is magnificent. It's truly scary — Chekov and Terrell and the eel larvae in their ears? Egads — and the stakes are high. Khan — making a welcome return from the series — is a foreboding, vicious villain with a legitimate axe to grind after the killing of his wife, which he of course blames on Captain Kirk.

Then the kicker — Spock dies! He dies in a way that feels irreversible, and actually stays dead awhile. (Not too long, of course: Star Trek needs him.) The death gives Wrath of Khan gravity and real stakes. Star Trek is beloved by intellectuals, but this one is sensationally emotional — and an obvious choice on any list of movie sequels better than the originals.

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

The Empire Strikes Back is the reason people love the Star Wars saga as much as they do — and much of the credit goes to the recently departed James Earl Jones, the voice of Darth Vader.

The wonderful first Star Wars is kind of a kid's movie: a fun, plucky, wonderfully inventive, tongue-in-cheek space caper and crowd pleaser that deserved its massive box office. But The Empire Strikes Back is about growing up.

Easy decisions are often the wrong ones. Everyone is constantly calculating current sacrifice against future reward. And just when things start to seem simple, they become incredibly, impossibly messy.

It also contains the flat-out best reveal of any movie, ever. If you saw it as a kid, in a theater, as I did, without knowing what was coming in Cloud City, then you know what it's like to have a story viscerally and completely explode your simple childish beliefs.

Spider-Man 2 (2004)

This is one of the best superhero movies ever made, because of the serious questions it asks about what it takes to be a hero. Can Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) be the savior of New York City as Spider-Man, and also carve out a small measure of happiness with Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst)? Director Sam Raimi doesn't make it easy.

But in the film's greatest moment, after a stunning subway battle with Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina), Peter learns that he doesn't always have to save the city. Sometimes the city can save him. It's one of the most obvious choices of the many superhero sequels better than the originals.

X2: X-Men United (2003)

The first X-Men was fine. It set up the characters and gave them black leather costumes that looked credible and not too comic-bookish to mainstream audience not yet fully ready to embrace the Marvel Universe — a situation that would soon change.

X2 raised the stakes dramatically, going apologetically full X-Men with a storyline inspired by the Chris Claremont-authored graphic novel God Loves, Man Kills.

X2 embraced that the X-Men comics have always been about: prejudice. The mutants of the X-Men face an unrepentant anti-mutant bigot, Colonel William Stryker (an icily great Brian Cox), and see their world so upended that they need to align themselves with their arch enemy, Magneto (Ian McKellan) to save Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart).

It is the X-Men movie that feels the most like Claremont's X-Men comics, and that's the highest compliment we can give.

Paddington 2

The original Paddington is a sheer delight, but Paddington 2 is one of the most universally beloved films of our present century. The continuing story of a Peruvian bear living with the  the Brown family in London, this edition of the Paddington saga finds the lovable bear caught up in a mistaken-identity crime caper that lands him behind bars.

For a time, it was the best-reviewed film on Rotten Tomatoes, not that that should mean much of anything. Just watch for yourself and we're confident you'll be charmed by our favorite marmalade-chugging little gentleman.

A third story in the series, which will take Paddington back to Peru, is in the works.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)

The first Captain America was terrific and inspiring: the story of a skinny kid from Brooklyn named Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) who was desperate to serve his country and stop the rise of fascism.

The Winter Soldier, though, took things in a wildly different direction, invoking the conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s to tell a story of corruption from within. Steve Rogers, it seems, thawed out into a world much more complicated than the one he left behind.

And the chemistry between Cap and the Black Widow aka Natasha (Scarlett Johansson, above with Evans) was crackling, which is almost never the case in a Marvel movie. An easy choice for our list of sequels better than the originals.

The Dark Knight (2008)

As good as Spider-Man 2 and X-2 are, The Dark Knight is better. And like all Christopher Nolan movies, it gets better on repeat viewings. It's a shoe-in for our list of sequels better than the originals — and the original, Batman Begins, was outstanding.

The film follows a terroristic villain named The Joker (Heath Ledger) who — you only realize on the second or third or tenth viewing — is the opposite of the spontaneous, disorganized madman he appears to be. He enlists Art of War tactics (Sun Tzu wrote, "All warfare is based on deception") to trick the citizens of Gotham into believing he's making it up as he goes along. In his most telling line, he asks, through macabre clown makeup, "Do I look like a guy with a plan?"

No, he doesn't — but he is. It doesn't quite succeed, but it does turn one of Gotham's greatest heroes into a villain while turning the other into a pariah.

It takes all the themes of Batman Begins — can one good person bring justice? — and inverts them to show how one bad person can make, in the words of Michael Caine's Alfred, "the world burn."

At least for a little while.

Dune: Part Two 2 (2024)

We liked Dune: Part One. Dropped in both theaters and on HBO Max during pandemic times, it didn't get the unveiling it deserved, but Denis Villeneuve's desert planet epic, based on the Frank Herbert novel, was nonetheless an assured, gorgeous achievement.

Dune: Part 2, however, is one of the most impressive movies we've ever seen. It has a pacing all its own, an understated certainty in its universe-building, and the best performance in the young careers of Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya, two actors who, to be honest, we didn't totally get until now. Dune 2 exposed the problem: their characters up until this point have been too small. They were made for bigger things.

Recent movies love to impose shaky, vague metaphors on modern political events, but Dune 2 does better — it recognizes a reality where justifications shift like the sands. You could deconstruct it for years, and we're confident people will. And it looks and sounds and feels so overwhelming that you'll feel like you've actually lived — and lost — on the planet Arrakis.

It's the latest film on our list of movie sequels better than the original.

Liked This List of Movie Sequels Better Than the Originals?

You might also like our list of 12 Rad '80s Movies Only Cool Kids Remember, or this list of the 11 Must-See Movies of 1984, featuring the original Terminator and an Indiana Jones sequel that didn't quite make our list.

Also let us know if you think Gremlins 2 belongs on the list of sequels better than the originals.

We're torn, honestly.

Main image: The Empire Strikes Back. Lucasfilm.

Editor's Note: Corrects main image.

You’re probably asking yourself, how did “Peeping Todd” —  a musical about a pervert stalking a woman — get investors in the Bible Belt? The short answer is, it didn’t. Let me explain.

“Who wouldn’t want to give money to this?!” I declared loudly  and ignorantly in a pre-production meeting with our producers, Alexander Jeffery and Chris Alan Evans. To which we all nodded along thinking the South, specifically Louisiana, was ready for such a task. 

I mean c'mon, our film can’t be that raunchy! Just read our synopsis for yourself: "Peeping Todd" is about a peeper obsessed with a woman named Claire. Despite the HOA closing in on him and Claire’s ex-boyfriend getting in his way, Todd won’t stop until Claire belongs to him. 

Making 'Peeping Todd' With Friends

The synopsis doesn’t sound like anything that crazy, right? What if I told you Todd gets into a singing fight with his own hand for trying to pleasure him? Or that Claire’s ex boyfriend, Thad, has an unhealthy obsession with shoving things up his posterior? 

Southern hospitality drew its line in the sand with our film. 

“But Josh Munds," you may say, "your film 'Peeping Todd' is premiering at Dances with Films June 20th at 11:45 pm! How did you finally get it made?”

First off, relax. Don’t rush me. Secondly, with a little help from my friends. 

Once we realized the chips were stacked against us, we decided to just double down and bet on ourselves. 

We pooled our resources, used gear we already owned, borrowed equipment from friends, and finally, found the perfect people to invest. 

Our close friend and producer extraordinaire, Tamra Corley Davis, stepped to the plate and went to bat for us.

The family of our lead actor, the aforementioned Chris Alan Evans, decided to step into the gauntlet and throw down as well. 

Steven Hellmen, a close personal friend of Alexander Jeffery, saw the potential of 'Peeping Todd' and brought some sizzling heat to our beef sandwich. 

Man, I love a good beef sandwich. 

I’ll speak selfishly and excitedly about one investor in particular — my wife, Melissa Munds, who just recently reached 2 million subscribers on her YouTube channel, @MelissaKristinTv. She told me whatever we need to do to make this happen, let’s do it. 

And so we did. 

It took two months to write the songs, record the demos and finish the script. Fifteen days to shoot it. Badda bing, badda boom. "Peeping Todd" was done. 

At the heart of this entire project was friends and family making something together. Even if that something has a one-thousand dollar budget for sex toys.

'Peeping Todd' premieres at Dances with Films Friday at 11:45 p.m.

“I’m excited about having a chance to deliver what fans have been suggesting for years… POTP as a stage musical," Williams said in a statement to MovieMaker. "I think it’s time has come!”

In addition to starring in the film, which De Palma wrote and directed, Williams composed the score and wrote the songs. Pressman told MovieMaker that he and Williams have spoken to multiple potential writers for the stage musical, including American Psycho and The Shards author Bret Easton Ellis — though no commitments have been made.

Pressman told MovieMaker that he, Williams and Ellis had "such an amazing dinner — Bret's such a true fan of Phantom and of Paul, and it was awesome to introduce the two of them in person."

Ellis has also mentioned the meeting on his podcast, though again, nothing is settled in terms of the stage musical's writer.

Asked about De Palma's potential involvement in the new stage play, Pressman said there were potentially "different paths... it's just so early."

De Palma has been considering a Phantom of the Paradise stage musical for decades. Pressman noted that he recently revisited a libretto, or book, that De Palma wrote for a prospective stage version of the film back in 1987. Pressman has also discussed the project with De Palma.

"We certainly want Brian to feel honored," Pressman said. "I went to go see Brian last fall, to talk about the dream. Phantom was an early and significant film for him and I'd say the favorite film of my father in his career. I think the chaos and originality of the whole experience was deeply inspiring."

Pressman noted that the plan is to open the stage play "not on Broadway" but "building to that stage."

Pressman took over his father's company, Pressman Film, after Ed Pressman's death in 2023. Besides Phantom of the Paradise, Pressman Film's credits include Wall Street, The Crow, and Mary Harron's film adaptation of American Psycho.

Sam Pressman, an actor and producer who grew up on film sets, has produced films including Harron's recent Daliland and the 2024 The Crow revamp starring Bill Skarsgård.

Paul Williams, Sam Pressman and The Phantom of the Paradise

The original Phantom of the Paradise starred William Finley as naive singer-songwriter Winslow Leach, who is tricked by Williams' Swan into sacrificing his life's work. Seeking revenge, Winslow dons a menacing silver mask — which gives his voice a metallic rasp — and terrorizes Swan's new concert hall, The Paradise, while demanding his songs be sung Swan's new protégé, Phoenix, played by soon-to-be Suspiria star Jessica Harper.

Williams is one of the most successful and influential songwriters of all, a legend who has worked with everyone from Barbra Streisand to The Carpenters to Daft Punk. His best known songs include the Oscar-nominated "Rainbow Connection" from 1979's The Muppet Movie, and "Evergreen," from the 1976 Streisand version of A Star Is Born. He wrote the lyrics for the song, which won a Grammy and Oscar.

At the time de Palma enlisted him for Phantom of the Paradise, Williams was best known for writing The Carpenters' “We’ve Only Just Begun” and “Rainy Days and Mondays,” as well as Bobby Sherman's "Cried Like a Baby" — and for clowning around on The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson. 

But Phantom of the Paradise let him embrace darkness: His ageless, possibly demonic Swan is like a cult leader, exerting control through song.

De Palma wrote and directed the film long before he became known for classics like Carrie, Scarface and The Untouchables. He was a largely underground filmmaker known at the time for counterculture movies like 1968’s Greetings and 1970’s Hi Mom, with a then-little-known Robert De Niro, and for the well-received 1972 horror film Sisters, with Margot Kidder. He thought Phantom of the Paradise could be his commercial breakthrough. 

The film, released by 20th Century Fox. underwhelmed at the box office and received mixed reviews: Los Angeles Times critic Kevin Thomas called it “delightfully outrageous,” while The New York Times’  Vincent Canby said it was “an elaborate disaster.”

But like another groundbreaking mid-'70s rock musical, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, it soon found a passionate, loyal audience who appreciated its beauty and unapologetic weirdness. (It hasn't played at midnight screenings all over the world for half a century like Rocky Horror, but neither has anything else.)

The passionate Phantom of the Paradise fandom includes an intensely dedicated following in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, as detailed in the documentary Phantom of Winnipeg.

Its biggest fan is almost certainly Ari Kahan, keeper of the The Swan Archives — the most comprehensive Phantom of the Paradise collection ever compiled. Kahan and Williams came together last year for several 50th anniversary screenings of Phantom.

The film's influence may be even greater than many fans realize — Kahan has said he believes De Palma's Phantom was a significant reference point for Darth Vader, noting that De Palma and Star Wars creator George Lucas are friends and contemporaries.

"Nobody that I know of has asked Lucas to his face, but I do know that there was a preview screening of Phantom on the Fox lot in July of 1974, so, four or five months before the film was released," Kahan told MovieMaker last year. "Lucas was at that screening and was sufficiently impressed by Paul Hirsch’s editing — and I assume that based on Brian’s recommendation of Hirsch, that Lucas brought him on to edit Star Wars.

"I can’t imagine that between the voice box and the heavy breathing and the black outfit that some of the Phantom didn’t creep into Darth Vader. But I have no hard evidence and nobody that I know has ever admitted to it.

Lucas has not responded to MovieMaker's request for comment.

Main image: William Finley in Phantom of the Paradise. 20th Century Fox.

When Murray Bartlett moved to the Provincetown, Massachusetts area a few years ago, he feared that it could cost him acting roles. He'd moved from his native Australia to New York City, after all, to be available for as many opportunities as possible.

But he was drawn to the Provincetown region — an idyllic LGBTQ+ and arts mecca at the tip of Cape Cod — because of the chance to be close to nature, to enjoy woods and beaches away from the tumult of a big city. It felt like the right thing to do at that stage in his life, even if it diminished his professional opportunities.

Then he got his best role to date — playing a pushed-to-the-limit resort employee on the first season of Mike White's The White Lotus. His career exploded just after he turned 50, and The White Lotus led to opportunities on shows like The Last of Us and Nine Perfect Strangers, and in new films like Opus, released earlier this year, and Ponyboi, out later this month. He's been nominated for two Emmys, and is incredibly in-demand.

"I knew I wanted to live here," he told producer Christine Vachon during a Q&A this past weekend at the Provincetown International Film Festival, where he received PIFF's award for Excellence in Acting. "I was nervous at leaving the city but it felt like a thing that was important to me for my life. ... I feel like I followed the things that felt good for me in my life."

That meant he was "happy and grounded," he said, when the opportunity arose, soon after he left New York, to star on The White Lotus. He also started to hone in on the question, "What are the stories that I really want to tell? And so that's sort of been my guiding principle from from then on."

Murray Bartlett on The White Lotus, Looking and More

Vachon, known for such acclaimed films as Far from Heaven, Boys Don't Cry, One Hour Photo, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Carol, May December and the brand-new The Materialists, noted that Murray Bartlett is such a chameleon that the first time they met for a meeting, she passed by without recognizing him.

He recounted for the Provincetown audience on Saturday evening that he got his start as an actor when his brother accidentally knocked out his two front teeth with a hammer, while trying to kill a spider back home in Australia. Bartlett had to go to speech therapy to learn to enunciate after his injury. That involved delivering lots of monologues — and he found that he loved it.

Also Read: Plainclothes Wins Best Narrative Feature at Provincetown International Film Festival

When he started acting professionally, he scored big roles on the Australian shows headLand and Neighbours. When he moved to New York City in 2000, his first big role was on Sex and the City. It made him realize he could make it as an actor in the United States.

Moving to Provincetown wasn't the first time he left New York City, certain that it would hurt his career — and then had the opposite happen. He recounted that he moved to Egypt during the Arab Spring to pursue a relationship with an Egyptian man, and ended up growing a mustache to try to fit in better with the locals.

"A lot of people had facial hair, so I grew a mustache to try and fit in," he told Vachon. "Then I got a call to audition for Looking, and so I just I did my first audition from Cairo, and I'm pretty sure the mustache had quite a lot to do with me getting the role."

His work on White Lotus included a hilariously explicit sex scene that many in the largely gay audience clearly remembered. Bartlett recalled that before appearing on the show, he spoke only briefly with White, mostly about how explicit he was willing to be.

'When I met with Mike, we only had a 45-minute meeting before we started shooting, and that was to talk about — rimming, really," he said.

The crowd erupted in laughter and applause.

"This is a man who knows his audience," noted Vachon.

Main image: Murray Bartlett at the Provincetown International Film Festival. MovieMaker.

The festival, held in the arts and LGBTQ+ mecca of Provincetown, Massachusetts, hosted a robust and boundary-pushing slate of top-notch films, including James Sweeney's Twinless and Annapurna Sriram's Fucktoys. Highlights included a Q&A between Ari Aster and John Waters, the patron saint of the festival, as Waters presented Aster the Filmmaker on the Edge Award.

Murray Bartlett was presented with the Excellence in Acting Award by iconic producer Christine Vachon. Eva Victor, director of Sorry Baby, and River Gallo, director of Ponyboi, both received the Next Wave Award.

Additional guests include Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke, whose delightful Honey Don't received a very warm reception, as well as Sweeney and Dylan O’Brien, who co-star in the twisty, fascinating Twinless.

Other guests included Linus O’Brien, whose lovely Rocky Horror Picture Show documentary Strange Journey opened the festival, as well as Brandon Flynn, François Arnaud, Michael Koehler, Annapurna Sriram, Sadie Scott, Aud Mason-Hyde, Carmen Emmi, Ryan White, Michael Strassner, Yashaddai Owens, Alexi Wasser, Kahane Corn Cooperman, Zackary Drucker, Allison Argo, Elegance Bratton, John Cooper, and Sundance Film Festival director Eugene Hernandez.

The festival closed with Michael Koehler’s Spiritus: No Business Like Dough Business, about a pizzeria and cafe that is one of PTown's most beloved and enduring businesses.

Plainclothes, Come See Me in the Good Light and More PIFF Winners

Plainclothes, shot in Emmi's hometown of Syracuse, New York, is the story of a cop who is assigned to bust gay men for having sex in public places — but ends up falling for one of his targets. Come See Me in the Good Light is the story of two poet lovers who embark on an exploraton of love and morality — with unexpected humor — after a terminal diagnosis.

The John Schlesinger Awards, presented to a first-time narrative and documentary feature filmmaker, went to Sarah Friedland for the narrative Familiar Touch and Brittany Shyne for the documentary Seeds.

The winers of the Juried Short Awards were "Dragfox," directed by Lisa Ott, for best animated short; "Signs From the Mainland," by Michael Cestaro, for Best New England Short; "Grandma Nai Who Played Favorites," by Chheangkea, for Best Queer Short; "Susana," directed by Gerardo Coello Escalante and Amandine Thomas, for Best Narrative Short; and "We'll Carry On Alright," directed by Megan Rossman, for Best Documentary Short.

"Yú Cì (Fish Bones)," by Kevin X. Yu, and "Tiger," by Loren Waters, received special jury mentions. (MovieMaker's house style is to italicize feature titles and put short film titles in quotes. )

Main image: Russell Tovey and Tom Blyth in Plainclothes, directed by Carmen Emmi.

Juneteenth marks the day in 1865 that Gordon Granger, a general in the Union Army, led thousands of Union troops into Galveston, Texas, to enforce Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation ordering the end of slavery.

Context is important. President Lincoln took a bold and courageous stand for his time. Of course Lincoln was far more advanced in his time than many of his white contemporaries.

But it's also important to understand our country's real history, and not just the most cheerful version of it. So here are some ugly truths about Lincoln, that go along with the laudable ones.

Lincoln Cared More About Preserving the Union Than Ending Slavery

Lincoln's main goal during his presidency, which began just before the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, was to preserve the Union — not to free slaves.

Christopher Bonner, a historian at the University of Maryland, says in Netflix's historical documentary Amend: "Lincoln understands that slavery is bad, which is a good start. But he says that if I could save the Union without freeing any slaves, I would do so."

"He has got to get the South back, and at this point, he'll do whatever it takes to win, even if it's at the expense of Black Americans," Smith says of Lincoln's thinking at the time.

You don't have to take the documentary's word for it. You can read Lincoln's August 22, 1862 letter here, in which he states: "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that."

He Didn't Always View People of Color as Equals

In 1861, Abraham Lincoln invited a group of African-American leaders to the White House, according to Columbia University historian Eric Foner. But instead of having a discussion about improving racial equality in America, he further underscored their inequality.

In Amend, Pedro Pascal reads the address that Lincoln delivered that day.

"Your race are suffering, in my judgment, the greatest wrong inflicted on any people," he said. "But even when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race."

Lincoln Blamed the Civil War on Black Americans

In his aforementioned address, Abraham Lincoln continued:

"Consider what we know to be the truth, but for your race among us, there could not be war."

Again, you don't have to rely on Netflix to research this. Here is a link to a primary source, "Lincoln's Address on Colonization to a Deputation of Colored Men."

Lincoln Wanted to Relocate Freed Black Americans to a Colony in Central America

"There is an unwillingness on the part of our people, harsh at it may be, for you, free colored people, to remain with us," Lincoln added. "It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated. The place I am thinking about having for a colony is Central America."

Yes, at one point, Lincoln wanted to remove Black people from the U.S. altogether.

"Part of what Lincoln is doing here is trying to get at that gnawing uncertainty in Black people that maybe we can't actually belong in this country," Bonner notes. "He's saying, we all understand that equality is what this country's supposed to be about, but really, racial equality is not gonna happen, so get with the program."

More Detail

Frederick Douglass, the famed abolitionist who traveled the country speaking about his own experiences as a freed former slave, was furious at Lincoln, according to Bonner.

His solution? To convince Lincoln that he needed Black Americans to win the war, thus encouraging white Americans to view Black Americans as equals.

Douglass argued that Lincoln couldn't win the war without abolishing slavery and that Black men were essential to the war effort, saying that men "who would be freed themselves must strike the blow." His logic was that if Black men shed their blood to fight for their country, then they must be considered citizens. (The painting above depicts him urging Lincoln to let Black men fight for the Union Army.)

"Douglass is convinced they will prove they are citizens, that they're deserving of rights, and that they're deserving of legal equality," Bonner adds.

The Main Reason Abraham Lincoln Signed the Emancipation Proclamation? To Win the War

Douglass' plan worked: Although at the time Lincoln couldn't "conceive of the United States as a biracial society," as Foner points out, "his views will begin to move forward very dramatically."

Foner adds: "The Emancipation Proclamation is issued as a military order. It's to help win the war."

The painting above depicts the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the first all-Black Union regiment, fighting for their country and freedom.

Disagree?

Feel free to share your objections in the comments and share sources. We love open debate about our country's history.

Thank You for Reading This List of Ugly Abraham Lincoln Facts No One Likes to Talk About

You might also like this list of Based on a True Story Movies That Are Mostly True, including Malcolm X, above.

Amend: The Fight for America is now streaming on Netflix. 

We aren't talking about movies with an X rating, which are their own category. And we aren't talking about movies like Serpico, The French Connection and Mean Streets that depict sleaze but are, you know, classy about it.

We're talking about movies that ruthlessly shock and pander for the sake of good clean — or not so clean — thrills. So here we go.

Caligula (1979)

When Penthouse founder Bob Guccione set out to make a mainstream movie, the result was Caligula — a story of the indulgent Roman emperor with big names attached.

Led by rather fearless Clockwork Orange veteran Malcolm McDowell, the film stars Teresa Ann Savoy (above), as well as Helen Mirren and Peter O'Toole. But what it's best known for is its over-the-top sex scenes.

It was written by the very respected Gore Vidal, who disavowed it after director Tinto Brass substantially altered his script.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

A gloriously shameless movie (starting with that title) that uses ickiness to its great advantage. It's one of the most effective and captivating horror movies ever made thanks to its hardcore atmosphere, oozing with sex and violence.

Filled with the sounds of animals and buzzing flies, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre makes clear from the start that it has no limits, even before we hear the first rev of Leatherface's chainsaw.

Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (1975)

lsa, She Wolf of the S.S. affects high-minded ideals with a ridiculous opening card (see above), but it's all just an excuse to tell the story of Ilsa, an evil Nazi warden who wants to prove women are better at suffering than men, and should therefore be allowed to fight for Hitler.

Of course, she proves this through a series of "experiments" on women who are scantily clad, at best. Let's all say it together now: "They couldn't make this today."

A Canadian film by director Don Edmonds, it managed to get reviewed by Gene Siskel, who called it "the most degenerate picture I have seen to play downtown." We can't tell if that's a thumbs up or thumbs down.

The Driller Killer (1979)

Abel Ferrara has made some straight-up classics — including King of New York and Bad Lieutenant — but the Bronx-born director cut his teeth with The Driller Killer. (His debut was an adult motion picture in which he also performed.)

Ferrara also appeared in The Driller Killer (above) about a New York City artist who deals with his urban angst by going on a killing spree with a power tool.

The film made it onto the United Kingdom's list of "video nasties" criticized for their extreme content.

Dolemite (1975)

Look, we love Dolemite, but when the hero of the movie is a pimp, you're watching a sleazy movie.

Rudy Ray Moore's endlessly entertaining Blaxploitation icon sprang from his filthy standup comedy routines: He passed on stories of a streetwise hustler named Dolemite who explained, "Dolemite is my name and f---ing up motherf---ers is my game."

Dolemite was also a triumph of DIY, indie moviemaking — as spelled out in the recent Dolemite Is My Name, starring Eddie Murphy.

Thriller: A Cruel Picture (1973)

Widely regarded as one of the best exploitation movies ever made, this Swedish film by director Bo Arne Vibenius stars Christina Lindberg as as a mute woman who endures a series of unbelievable traumas — which Vibenius isn't shy about showing onscreen.

She eventually finds herself a double-barrel shotgun and goes on a revenge mission that she — and her targets — very much deserve.

The Last House on the Left (1972)

We hate this movie, because it's so incredible effective. One of the most shameless 1970s movies of all, it has a handmade quality that makes it violence and cruelty feel all the more real.

Director Wes Craven made his debut with Last House on the Left — a story of abduction, brutality and vengeance, scored by eerie hippie music — before going on to create the classic Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream horror franchises. With all due respect to those films, they aren't remotely as scary as Last House on the Left.

Salo (1975)

Inspired by the writings of Marquis de Sade, this film by Pier Paolo Pasolini is about a group of fascists who round up a group of adolescents and do horrible things to them for 120 days. Just make a list of things that gross you out, and we promise they're in Salo.

Interestingly, Abel Ferrara, who you may remember from our Driller Killer entry, made a movie about Pasolini in 2014 about his life around the time he was making Salo.

It stars the great Willem Dafoe, a good friend and frequent collaborator of Ferrara's.

Saturday Night Fever (1977)

You probably remember the disco, but not the desperation.

Saturday Night Fever is a nuanced and gritty character study of Tony Manero (John Travolta, above) that unflinchingly depicts racism and sexual violence. Tony is deeply flawed, and no hero by today's standards, but the movie tries to win back our affection for him by the end.

For such a successful film, it's a very sleazy movie and a rough watch — but the dancing is fantastic, at least.

Piranha (1978)

One of many killer-animals movies rushed to the screen after the blockbuster success of Jaws, Piranha — unlike, say, Orca, to use one example — made no pretense of respectability. And we respect that.

A Roger Corman production through and through, this movie existed to show swimmers get attacked by toothy fish, and we love that. It's the epitome of a B movie.

But it was also important to the careers of some great filmmakers, including Corman: Six years after Piranha, Joe Dante went on to direct the massive hit Gremlins. And Piranha co-writer John Sayles would go on to make films including Eight Men Out and The Secret of Roan Inish.

The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977)

A movie we both love and respect, The Kentucky Fried Movie is a sendup of grindhouse and sleaze that is also, itself, pretty sleazy — but in a good way. It leaves no joke unturned, and parody-movie sendups go waaay further than necessary to satirize the things they're satirizing.

The Kentucky Fried Movie is one of funniest of all sleazy movies, and it led to more mainstream, less sleazy success for director John Landis and writers David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker, who would later go on to make Airplane.

Liked Our List of Shameless 1970s Movies?

If you liked this, you might also like our list of Gen X Movie Stars Gone Too Soon.

And you might also like this behind the scenes look at The Kentucky Fried Movie.

Main image: The Kentucky Fried Movie. United Film Distribution Company

Dads saving daughters is maybe the most enduring trope in action movies, and it's easy to see why: There's no more primal motivation than protecting your children.

But these movies are also fascinating for the way they get into generational differences, societal criticism, and middle-aged men's anxieties about a changing world that may seem to be leaving them behind. They're all wish-fulfillment fantasies, on some level.

Here are 12 action movies about dads saving daughters.

Lone Wolf McQuade (1983)

There's a lot going on in Lone Wolf McQuade, in which Chuck Norris plays an ex-military Texas Ranger who now lives in isolation with a wolf. But he soon runs up against a criminal gang led by the evil Wilkes (David Carradine).

There's lots of conflict beforehand, but things really pick up when Wilkes kidnaps McQuade's daughter Sally (Dana Kimmell) and takes her to Mexico. This leads to a martial arts fight between McQuaid and Wilkes that was kind of a huge deal in 1983 — Chuck Norris versus the star of Kung Fu???

Wilkes almost wins, while wearing a very preppie sweater, no less. But then he very stupidly strikes Sally, inadvertently unleashing McQuade's dads-saving-daughters powers.

Commando (1985)

Kind of an amped-up, more streamlined, much funnier Lone Wolf McQuade, Commando was another of the first films to realize that a simple retired military dad with a tough abducted daughter make for a perfect setup for a manly-man action movie.

Arnold Schwarzenegger rattles off a series of deadly one-liners as John Matrix, the best-named movie hero ever. Young Alyssa Milano is terrific as Jenny Matrix, and Rae Dawn Chong is also great as one of the all-time great can-do-anything action movie sidekicks.

At just 90 minutes, Commando is one of the best-plotted, fastest-moving films in the daughters in distress genre.

True Lies (1994)

So why not do it again?

Schwarzenegger teamed up with Jamie Lee Curtis for this James Cameron epic that is mostly about the deception-filled marriage of Harry and Helen Trasker (Schwarzenegger and Curtis), but culminates, of course, in the abduction of their daughter, Dana (Eliza Dushku.)

It has one of the most spectacular final face-offs in the history of dads-saving-daughters movies, involving Dana, a skyscraper, a jet and a helicopter.

Air Force One (1997)

Speaking of planes: Air Force One stars Harrison Ford as regular-guy president James Marshall, president whose plane is hijacked by terrorists, led by Ivan Korshunov (Gary Oldman).

That's bad enough, but then Ivan holds a gun to the First Daughter's head, triggering those dad saving daughters powers we told you about earlier, and fights back, uttering the most famous line in the film, "Get of my plane."

We wish the special effects were a little better at the end of the plane, but we're mostly just on board for President Ford.

Live Free or Die Hard (2007)

The fourth Die Hard film raises the stakes from the previous three by having the estranged daughter of John McClane (Bruce Willis) get abducted by cyberterrorists.

She's Lucy Gennero-McClane (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), and if you've seen a Die Hard movie you know that a woman not embracing McClane's surname as her own is shorthand for him feeling inadequate as a man. But things work out OK.

The next Die Hard movie paired up John McClane with his son, but that's another gallery for another day. To die hard.

Taken (2008)

The gold standard of dads saving daughters movies, Taken stars Liam Neeson as Brian Mills, a dad who has to rely on his "very particular set of skills" to save his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) from being auctioned off by absolutely horrible people to other absolutely horrible people.

Taken, more than any other film on this list, plays out like a very effective divorced dad fantasy: When his ex-wife Lenore (Famke Janssen) marries someone who is ostensibly a better provider, Brian proves his worth by doing what the new husband can't.

Mills is always civil to Lenore's new husband Stuart (Xander Berkeley), but by Taken 2, the marriage is collapsing — and we can only assume the new husband turned into a jerk because he couldn't handle the assault on his manhood of being totally shown up by his wife's ex.

The best thing about Taken is how well it establishes the emotional dynamic between the family before plunging into some thrilling action sequences, played out over a tight 90 minutes. Bryan is the best of all dads saving daughters, so good he inspired two sequels.

Taken 2 (2012)

Taken 2 ups the ante: This time mom and dad get taken, and Kim has to help them, using some incredibly cool techniques involving triangulation and grenades. But, this being a dads saving daughters movie, Kim eventually needs rescuing, courtesy of her pop.

Still, this might be our favorite Taken movie because of the cool twists on the dads saving daughters genre and the inventiveness of the script and action scenes.

Taken 3 (2014)

There's not as much taking in this Taken, but it nonetheless fulfills some angry divorced dad fantasies: mom's new husband Stuart (played in this one by Dougray Scott, replacing Xander Berkeley) turns out to be an absolutely horrible person, and only Brian Mills can stop him.

This one breaks new ground in the dads saving daughters genre, because Brian has to save not only Kim but her unborn baby.

One thing we love about this film is that it spawned the one-liner, Taken 3 makes Taken 2 look like Taken.

Hardcore (1980)

When his daughter (Ilah Davis) disappears into the adult film industry, Ohio prude Jake VanDorn (George C. Scott) must infiltrate the unseemly business and even impersonate a sleaze himself in order to find out what extremely upsetting stuff his daughter has gotten into. He works alongside industry insider Niki (Season Hubley, great) and becomes something of a father figure to her, too.

Written and directed by the great Paul Schrader, the film is a fascinating look at how the industry worked around the time of its release, even though Jake's transformation isn't totally convincing.

He also gets in a fight with a much younger, more street-savvy young man at the end, and that doesn't totally make sense, but this is still an oft-imitated touchstone in the dads saving daughters in distress genre.

It also benefitted from one of the most ruthless ad campaigns in movie history: An ad that just shared Jake's exclamation upon seeing his daughter on-screen: "Oh my God, that's my daughter."

San Andreas (2014)

Another classic dads saving daughters in distress setup: Macho L.A. helicopter pilot Ray Gaines (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson) is estranged from his wife Emma (Carla Gugino) because he's too cool, or something.

But then an earthquake traps their daughter Blake (Alexandra Daddario) with mom's new boyfriend, Daniel.

Because this is a dads saving daughters movie, mom's new boyfriend is of course not up to the task of protecting Blake, because that's dad's job. Would you believe that by the end of the movie, Ray and Emma are reconsidering their future?

Stillwater (2021)

You might expect Stillwater to be a lot like Taken: Matt Damon, Jason Bourne himself, lets loose in France trying to save his wrongfully convicted daughter? Sign us up.

But it turns out to be something more complex, and interesting than the typical dads saving daughters routine. Damon's Oklahoma roughneck Bill Baker starts out deeply suspicious of the French, and assumes his daughter (Abigail Breslin) has been railroaded into a cell. But he has to solve the problem with his brains and empathy, not brawn.

Some dad-on-the-warpath movies are really just excuses for a middle-aged "regular guy" to fight a world that's gotten too permissive for his tastes. But Stillwater isn't.

Prisoners (2013)

This is another of those (sighs, rolls eyes) thoughtful movies that asks dads to consider the ethical and moral ramifications (barf) of rushing to judgment instead of just beating people up.

Hugh Jackman plays Keller Dover, a man who goes on the warpath when his daughter is kidnapped. (Terrence Howard plays another dad who goes down the path reluctantly.) When their daughters are kidnapped, they kidnap a suspect — played by Paul Dano — and go medieval on him.

As you've probably intuited, Prisoners is filled with twists.

Blood Father (2016)

Mel Gibson plays John Link, an ex-con and recovering alcoholic who is now a tattoo artist. When his estranged daughter Lydia (future The Boys star Erin Moriarty) gets in trouble with her ex-boyfriend's criminal gang, John learns that she's become addicted to drugs and tries to help her recover.

Lydia ends up abducted, and her dad is able to save the missing link — which is also the name of his business: Missing Link tattoo. But father and daughter are also able to recover the missing link in their relationship. It works on so many levels.

Something we like about this movie is the dad using his wisdom to help his daughter in her recovery from addiction. Sometimes loving and supportive dads are even more helpful than dads saving daughters by beating people up.

Liked This Fathers Day List of Movies About Dads Saving Daughters?

We're betting you might also like this list of the 15 Most Beautiful Movie Cars.

Main image: Commando. Warner Bros. 20th Century Fox.

So began a spellbinding conversation at the Provincetown International Film Festival between two of the most uncompromising film directors — Waters, the rule-breaking icon who serves as the Cape Cod festival's patron saint, and Aster, who came to Provincetown for the first time to accept the festival's Filmmakers on the Edge award, a month before the release of his latest, Eddington.

The two filmmakers — who first met years ago at a party at David Sedaris' house — were deeply complimentary of each other, while self-deprecatingly funny about themselves. Aster, for example, volunteered that none of his subsequent films have been as successful as his 2018 breakout Hereditary, which earned $80 million on a $10 million budget.

"It's just been a declension ever since," Aster laughed. He joked that when Hereditary was a huge hit, "I took it for granted. I was like, 'Well, that's how it's gonna be.'"

Waters countered by noting the intense critical praise for Hereditary, then shared one of his own reviews, Janet Maslin's takedown of his 1977 film Desperate Living: "You could look far and wide to find a more pointlessly ugly movie ... but why would you bother?"

From there, the two shared a series of amusing gripes about the state of movies, though their love of filmmaking shined through.

"The movie business, as I know it, is over," Waters said at one point, asking Aster if he felt the same.

"Well, you know, it's feeling bad," said Aster. "And I'm very lucky. I'm making the films I want to make. But just, you know, the culture at large is feeling just... it's horrible. I don't know. Everything feels bad."

In true artistic fashion, he's processing that frustration through storytelling. In Eddington, a Covid horror film set in 2020, Joaquin Phoenix's small-town New Mexico sheriff faces off with Pedro Pascal's mayor, as paranoia and conspiracy theories run rampant. The film addresses American distrust and division.

Waters said of Eddington: "There are no heroes. There's no one to root for. That's why I like this so much. The left and the right are both so horrible. Is it possible to have nostalgia for Covid?"

The audience roared, though Aster clarified, "I don't know how nostalgic it is."

John Waters and Ari Aster on Gatekeepers

Aster is perhaps the most revered genre filmmaker of recent years, and Waters is a patron saint not just of the Provincetown festival but of bold filmmakers everywhere: Best known for the 1988 hit Hairspray, he broke out in the 1970s with shocking films like 1972's Pink Flamingos and 1974's Female Trouble. He is loved both for his films and for freely speaking his mind.

In 2023, for example, after Aster's 179-minute, surrealistic tragicomedy Beau is Afraid failed at the box office and received divisive reviews, Waters delightedly named it the best film of the year.

Though Waters and Aster joked about their occasional bad reviews, Waters said he sort of misses the era when critics had more influence.

"It used to be, in the old days, if you had an art film and you got a ringing review in The New York Times, it was a hit, and if you got a bad review, it definitely failed," Waters said. "Now, a rave review doesn't make any difference, but if there's a bad review, it still fails. So I don't know. I miss the power of the critics in a way."

Waters and Aster shared amusement and frustration with all the forces pushing them toward compromise, including focus groups (which Waters calls "fuck-us groups," because of how their input can dilute a filmmaker's vision).

Waters noted that A24, which distributes Aster's films, is like a modern version of Harvey Weinstein's Miramax, without Weinstein's baggage. He also told Aster that Weinstein once offered to release his 1998 film Pecker — if he would change a key location.

"If it's not a gay bar and it's a titty bar, I'll do it," Waters quoted Weinstein telling him. (Waters passed.)

Aster, meanwhile, talked about studio executives who always ask him to shorten his films.

"That's always a big fight while I'm editing," he said.

"But how do you win?" asked Waters.

"It's just a long negotiation," said Aster. "I've never been pushed to in any way compromise the films at all. It's always just, get them shorter. Which, you know, if anybody were in the room hearing the arguments, they would not be on my side."

Asked if he'd ever had trouble with the ratings board, he noted that his 2019 film Midsommar briefly had an NC-17, before he ultimately got an R. Waters recalled that at one point, he was told he couldn't use the title Pecker: "I said, 'How about Shaft? How about Free Willy?"

The Q&A ended on a sincere note as Aster told Waters how much his films have meant to him.

"It's really an honor to receive this from you, John," Aster said as he accepted the Filmmaker on the Edge award. "You're one of my heroes, and when I was growing up, your films were a real North Star for me."

Main image: Ari Aster and John Waters. MovieMaker.

The Witches of Eastwick (1987)

In this adaptation of a John Updike novel of the same name, an unlikely coven of New England witches played by Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer and Susan Sarandon unwittingly open the door to the devil himself, played by Jack Nicholson. OK, technically he's called Daryl Van Horne, but come on: Van Horne?

The role finds Nicholson at his most endearingly devilish. He soon enters into complicated relationships with all three of the women.

Shame! Shame!

Devil's Advocate (1997)

This 1997 melodrama finds Al Pacino playing the devil as high-powered lawyer John Milton, who, well, bedevils a promising new hire played by Keanu Reeves — as well as his innocent wife, played by Charlize Theron (above).

Milton is immensely charming and seductive at the start, then gets more brutal and nasty as things descend into total chaos.

Shame!

Angel Heart (1987)

Pacino's pal Robert De Niro played the devil 10 years earlier, in the form of a ponytailed smoothie called Louis Cyphre who hires a private investigator Johnny Angel (Mickey Rourke) to track down a missing singer in this Southern Gothic/noir.

Soon a young woman named Epiphany Proudfoot (Lisa Bonet) enters the picture, and things get very disturbing.

De Niro's decision to play Louis Cyphre as restrained and cautious is quite unsettling and effective. He's perhaps our greatest actor.

Shame!

Also Read: The 5 Sexiest Movies About the Amish

The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941)

Walter Huston's soft-spoken, diabolical Mr. Scratch (above) has an energy and charisma that seem impossible to resist. He rigs a trial against statesman and attorney Daniel Webster, as they take a wild and twisty tour through American history. It's a challenging and ambitious story of what it means to be American.

Shame on this film for ruining America's wholesome 1940s image... and for glamorizing the devil.

Oh God! You Devil (1984)

The third film in the Oh God! series — following 1977's Oh, God and 1980's Oh God! Book II — finds the irresistible George Burns, who played God in the first two films, doubling up to play both God and his old nemesis, the devil. His mission: To buy the soul of a struggling rock musician.

With all respect to Gracie, Burns and Burns also make quite the comedic duo.

Shame on George Burns. Shame!

The Prophecy (1995)

Another handsome devil movie: This time Viggo Mortenson plays a philosphical, manipulative version of Lucifer, pushing buttons and trying to protect his own interests amid a complex war between angels and humankind. He's a carrot-or-stick type of devil, charming with an invitation, but also happy to just drag people to the bad place.

Also, is it us or does Mortenson's devil look a little like DeNiro's Louis Cyphre?

Anyway: Shame!

Also Read: 10 Sex Scenes Somebody Should Have Stopped

Constantine (2005)

No one's saying Peter Stormare's version of the Satan is a nice guy, but he is pretty cool in Constantine, showing up as he does, barefoot in a white suit, slowing down time and walking through shattered glass like the mysterious, sultry star of a '90s R&B video.

Needless to say: shame.

The Story of Mankind (1957)

This very weird, ambitious courtroom drama finds Mr. Scratch — played by a beguiling Vincent Price, above — arguing before a Great Court of Outer Space that humankind is more evil than good. His magnificent cravat, needless to say, gives him an unfair advantage.

Price was one of the earlier screen actors to figure out that a smooth-talking devil is scarier and more interesting than a raging one. You catch more souls with honey than vinegar, we guess.

Anyway, shame.

Bedazzled (1966)

Peter Cook is a swingin' '60s devil in the original Bedazzled, in which he offers seven wishes to a nebbishy lad played by Dudley Moore.

The most amusing aspect of the film — and most stories about deals with the devil — is seeing how he'll technically fulfill his end of the bargain, while making things infinitely worse.

Given that this version of Bedazzled is best known for a seduction scene with Raquel Welch, someone wisely said: Hey. what if the whole movie were a big seduction? Which brings us to the next film in our gallery.

(Oh, and also: Shame.)

Bedazzled (2000)

The most glamorous of all movie devils, Elizabeth Hurley spends this superior remake of the 1966 Bedazzled tormenting the hapless Eliot (Brendan Fraser) while adopting a variety of amusing guises and costumes. She's absurdly charismatic as a tech-savvy, high-fashion devil who uses computer programs to exploit her targets' weaknesses.

It may be Hurley's best role — pitch-perfect as she is as Vanessa in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, she's mostly playing it straight to Mike Myers' Austin.

In this one, she owns all the diabolical amusements.

Shame! Shame! Shame!

Little Nicky (2000)

With his prosthetic horns and pointy ears, Harvey Keitel is a watchable curiosity in this very broad, not-great Adam Sandler comedy.

He plays the devil (often referred to as Your Evilness) as a hard-working, coolheaded, basically decent guy trying to hold everything together while juggling his difficult job and demanding dad (Rodney Dangerfield). Keitel, masterful actor that he is, glamorizes the devil by making him seem harmless.

And also, the voice that Adam Sandler does throughout the movie: Shame!

Enjoyed This List of Shameful Movies That Glamorize the Devil?

You might also like this list of 12 Rad '80s Movies Only Cool Kids Remember. Or cleanse your soul with this list of 1950s Movies That Are Still a Total Delight.

Main image: Elizabeth Hurley in Bedazzled, the inspiration for this whole gallery.

Think there's a better Bond than Goldfinger? By all means, let us know in the comments. We promise not to be too shaken or even stirred.

And now, here are 12 Goldfinger behind the scenes images.

Shine On

Goldfinger is perhaps most famous for the demented way that the titular villain kills his aide-de-camp, Jill Masterson, played by Shirley Eaton.

He kills her by having her painted gold, which leads to her death by skin suffocation.

Above, Sean Connery ensures that the real Eaton isn’t suffering any skin suffocation despite her gold body paint. She seems fine.

Sharp-Dressed Man

For once, a Bond girl isn’t wearing the most revealing costume. Here’s Connery with Eaton and Bond creator Ian Fleming, who died the month before Goldfinger was released.

If you're interested in the dynamic between Connery and Fleming, you can read about how he ultimately came around to the idea of casting Sean Connery by reading this excerpt of Nicholas Shakespeare's terrific Ian Fleming: The Complete Man.

We consider it a must-read for serious Bond fans.

Roles in the Hay

Connery and Honor Blackman, who plays, uh, Ms. Galore, rehearse an infamous fight scene in the Goldfinger behind the scenes image above.

We’re not sure if we can safely type Ms. Galore’s first name, as our stories are syndicated to lots of different media platforms with lots of understandably sensitive filters.

It's quite feline, though.

True Love

Sean Connery as James Bond with his true love: His iconic Aston Martin, one of the all-time most beautiful movie cars.

A fully restored Goldfinger Aston Martin DB5 sold for $6.4 million in 2019.

Auction house RM Sotheby’s said at the time that it included such features as “hydraulic over-rider rams on the bumpers, a Browning .30 caliber machine gun in each fender, wheel-hub mounted tire-slashers, a raising rear bullet-proof screen, an in-dash radar tracking scope, oil, caltrop and smoke screen dispensers, revolving license plates, and a passenger-seat ejection system.”

Odd Job

Harold Sakata, who played Oddjob, clowns around on set and shows he’s no bad guy behind the scenes. 

He's one of our all-time favorite Bond villains, though, who set the standard for many more to come.

Though none matched the coolness of his flying hat routine.

The Fall Guy

From left to right, actor-stuntman Bob Simmons, who played Bond in the gunbarrel sequence, Connery, and Nadja Regin, who played Bonita.

The gunbarrel sequence, of course, it the opening segment in the film in which Bond, wearing a hat, walks across the screen in profile and suddenly turns to fire his gun toward the audience as the Bond theme plays.

Did you think that was Connery? We get it. So did we.

Make-Up

Eaton’s gold paint reportedly took 90 minutes to apply, but it was worth it: Her gold-painted image graced the cover of LIFE magazine as part of the promotional campaign for the film, the third of the 27 Bond movies.

If you’re a collector, her issue of LIFE is the November 6, 1964 issue.

She’s being painted above by makeup artist Paul Rabiger, who also worked on Bond films including Thunderball, You Only Live Twice and From Russia With Love.

Good as Gold

Shirley Eaton is all smiles, even covered in gold paint.

Eaton, a British actress also known for the Carry On films, retired from acting in 1969 to devote herself to family, but in 1999 she release her autobiography, perfecly titled Golden Girl.

It was a bestseller, and she went on to release three more books.

In the Club

Harold Sakata as Oddjob and Gert Fröbe as Auric Goldfinger.

Orson Welles was among those considered to play Goldfinger, a gold tycoon who is obsessed with the soft metal, but he wanted too much money. (Shouldn’t that have made him even more qualified for the role?)

Fröbe, a German actor, was dubbed by actor Michael Collins, continuing something of a Bond tradition: Ursula Andress was similarly subbed in the original Bond film, Dr. No.

From Russia With Love

Tania Mallet, who played Jill’s sister, Tilly Masterson, poses for an amateur photographer named Sean Connery.

Mallet, and English actress and model who sometimes signed her name with two Ts, had an origin story straight out of a Bond movie: She was a descendent of Russian aristocrats on her mother’s side.

She had auditioned for the role of Tatiana Romanova in the second Bond film, From Russia with Love, but the filmmakers passed because of her British accent.

How Sean Connery Became Bond

Ian Fleming, left, didn’t initially think Connery resembled the super-suave elegant James Bond of his novels, who of course resembled Fleming himself.

But he soon saw the appeal of the Scottish actor, and in one of his novels after Connery’s casting, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, he even “responded to Connery’s cinematic Bond by putting some Scottish blood into him,” as Nicholas Shakespeare wrote in the new book Ian Fleming: The Complete Man.

Liked These Goldfinger Behind the Scenes Photos?

You’ll probably also love These Images From Dr. No, the first James Bond movie, featuring Sean Connery and Ursula Andress. You might also like this video of 10 Gen X Film Stars Gone Too Soon.

Main image: An insert of Sean Connery and Margaret Nolan in Goldfinger. United Artists.

That image was a memorable one for filmmaker Walter Thompson-Hernandez, who was struck by the juxtaposition of the innocent activity with the police brutality happening in the same areas. It was enough to inspire him to craft the Tribeca entry Kites, which made its world premiere during the festival. 

“I knew there was a story here, a film that speaks to the complexity of how heartbreaking but how beautiful life can be,” he tells MovieMaker. “On one hand, there's kite flying and how earnest and how pure that is. On the other, there's death and police violence. For me, Kites is a long visual poem that isn't rooted in traditional acts. It's vignettes about three or four different people who live in this community.”

Kites took five years to make. Thompson-Hernandez put together $100,000 and convinced a group of friends in Brazil to star. He had another friend do the music, and used a constantly evolving outline to follow the characters in the most natural ways possible. There was no script and plenty of improvisation, and what emerged were themes of life, love and duality.

We spoke with Thompson-Hernandez about his unique process for this film, shooting in Brazil, and the importance of representing these characters and real-life favelas internationally. 

Walter Thompson-Hernandez on the Unusual Process of Shooting Kites

Amber Dowling: Did this process take longer than you potentially anticipated because of how you shot it and put it together?  

Walter Thompson-Hernandez: It took as long as I think it was supposed to have taken. We took six different trips to Brazil and each time we stayed for five or six days. After the third trip, I thought we were done. But then I would go to edit and find more beats and more discovery. Eventually, I realized there could be a really beautiful component of protection if we saw these guardian angels in heaven. So it just continued to grow in a way that feels beautiful and interesting and provocative.

Amber Dowling: The scenes of angels and magical realism tie your vignettes together. Tell me more about threading them into the film. 

Walter Thompson-Hernandez: They arose from conversations with my friends who had relatives and people they knew who were victims of police violence. It led to these deep, late night conversations about what protection looks like and what safety looks like and what God looks like in spirituality. I came to the conclusion that so many of us believe in protection and have a guardian angel of sorts. Well, what would it look like if our protective angel smoked cigarettes in heaven or got their hair braided by an angel friend? It’s just so ridiculous, but also so beautiful and so honest, like the movie. It’s imperfect and it's beautiful and it's unpolished, and it just feels like a really honest, longer poem.

Amber Dowling: For a film that took half a decade to make, your friends don’t seem to age onscreen. Did you use any tricks?

Walter Thompson-Hernandez: No, it's funny, because the actors look so great. The children, though, their voices really evolved over five years. Sometimes I'd go back to Brazil and someone’s voice was a little deeper. Or their personalities had evolved. We never knew what kind of child we would get.

Amber Dowling: What does it mean for you to bring this film out of Brazil?

Walter Thompson-Hernandez: I have so much fondness for the work that my friends did. They're all first-time actors, and they're really excited to watch this movie. It just feels really special. This is a story that is both rooted in the specificity of a place, of Rio, of a neighborhood there, but it also has an incredibly universal message. Of hope, of protection, of redemption. 

It asks this question about our deeds: How are they understood in the eyes of God and the eyes of each other? What does it look like for us to try to do well sometimes and hope for the best?

Also Read: Nobu Documentary Director Matt Tyrnauer on Capturing the Beauty of a Food Revolution

Amber Dowling: Your main character is a drug dealer but also the funder of a community kite festival. What messages were you going for with that duality?

Walter Thompson-Hernandez: This movie is an incredibly existential film. We start the movie right in the middle of what I imagine is this existential crisis. Someone who was a drug dealer but also wants to do well and is kind. He has a mother and a family that he thinks he's doing right by. It's asking deep questions about life and our roles and what we do with our time on earth.

Amber Dowling: How did you want to represent the kites themselves in the film?

Walter Thompson-Hernandez: Every favela has a kind of annual kite festival that is probably one of the most important days of the year outside of Carnival. I wanted to structure that as the sort of endpoint. It was important to show that these favelas have this beautiful, multi-generational experience in a way that most neighborhoods in the US aren't as connected to each other in terms of generations. 

There are men and women and boys and girls who fly kites every day and really love kites. That's the most beautiful thing in terms of the importance of people like our main character in an underserved community. 

Amber Dowling: Why premiere at Tribeca, and what are your next goals for the film?

Walter Thompson-Hernandez: It just feels like a city and a festival that is incredibly international. I've always been a fan of Tribeca, and it felt like the right place to have a world premiere. We're still waiting to hear back from a bunch of other festivals, but this was the first. There's already some interest for distribution, and we're hoping to make that happen.

I hope people are drawn to the poetry of the movie. It's not a movie that is traditionally made or traditionally structured. If someone is hoping to find a clean and neat three-act structure, they're not going to find that here. It's a long visual poem that is slower in some moments, but there's an interesting moment towards the end where it brings everything together. I'm excited for the conversations that we can have.

Main image: Kites, courtesy of Tribeca.

In honor of Robert Eggers' Nosferatu — which is thriving at the box office and does seem to meet audience demands — and the new Leigh Whannell version of The Wolf Man, which is in theaters this weekend, and for which we have high hopes — here are eight horror remakes nobody really needed.

Night of the Living Dead (1990)

We love Candyman veteran Tony Todd as the lead. We love makeup maestro Tom Savini as the director. But this movie just wasn't necessary, because the 1968 original is — in its DIY, low-budget, black and white simplicity — perfect.

This remake of George A. Romero’s hugely influential genre classic isn’t awful so much as it is kind of pointless — especially with Romero staying on as screenwriter and executive producer.

While the story remains basically the same — a group of survivors hole up inside an abandoned farmhouse during a zombie attack — the original’s unnerving, documentary-style realism is replaced with a generic horror flick atmosphere.

This time, Barbara (Patricia Tallman) isn’t a fragile woman scared for her life, but an accomplished killer of the living dead. While the zombie makeup effects are noticeably improved (thanks to Savini, no surprise), this version loses the impact of the shocking, powerful finale of the original. (Which is, by the way, on our list of 12 Movies That Made More than 100 Times Their Budget.)

When it comes to horror remakes, we're always going to prefer a movie that improves on the best aspects of an imperfect original — like 2004's Dawn of the Dead — over a film that tries fix what ain't broke.

The Haunting (1999)

With this horror remake, Robert Wise’s chilling 1963 haunted house movie (based on Shirley Jackson’s acclaimed novel, The Haunting of Hill House) is transformed into a big-budget Hollywood disaster. The movie centers around the conflict between a team of paranormal investigators (Liam Neeson and Catherine Zeta-Jones among them) and the foreboding mansion in which they are determined to spend several nights.

The original Haunting is a masterpiece of implied horror, as very little in the film is actually seen. Instead, the unnerving sound effects and disorienting camera work merely suggest the scares, to terrifying effect. By contrast, this, one of the more misbegotten horror remakes, replaces the understated scares of the original with CGI effects that aren't effective.

Directors of horror remakes — and all remakes — should look at this film as an example of how CGI can take audiences out of a movie. (This one arrived in that awkward dawn of a new millennium era when CGI was possible, but not exactly convincing. (See also our list of 11 Movies Cursed by Bad CGI.)

The Wicker Man (2006)

Some might say there's no need to re-imagine the 1973 Christopher Lee cult classic.

Yet, due in part to Nicolas Cage’s ability to keep a straight face while saying the most absurd lines, the movie provides a kind of perverse fascination. Cage stars as a policeman who discovers a secretive community while investigating the disappearance of a young girl on a mysterious island.

We also like Twin Peaks veteran Angelo Badalamenti's score, as we like all Badalamenti's scores.

Last House on the Left (2009)

This update of the 1972 Wes Craven film is very well-crafted, consistently suspenseful and frightening, as well as very well-acted. So why is it on this list? Because it still can't match the lightning-in-a-dirty-bottle terror of the original. The 1970s hippie-cult sadism of the 1972 Last House on the Left is endlessly upsetting, and the original has a mean streak that still creeps us out today.

The worst thing we can say about this version is that it ends up being kind of hopeful, which undercuts the perfect bleakness of the original. There are some movies so effective that you shouldn't even try to remake them, and Last House on the Left is among them. Though we will say that the director of this remake, Dennis Iliadis, did as well as anyone could have done.

He also had the blessing and help of original Last House on the Left director Wes Craven.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

On the other hand, when Wes Craven objects to a remake of one of his movies, maybe you should listen. The 1984 Nightmare on Elm Street is a pretty flawless horror movie — and its imperfections only add to its peculiar charm.

“It does hurt," Craven told IGN of the remake. "It does because it’s such an important film for me that, unfortunately, when I signed the original contract, I gave up all rights to it and so there’s nothing I can do about it”. 

The new version had the excellent Jackie Earle Haley taking over Freddie Krueger's striped shirt, fedora and claws, but come on. There's only one Freddie, and his name is Robert Englund. Also, the decision to CGI Freddie and make get rid of his terrible jokes made the character much less memorable.

Also, Rooney Mara, who plays Nancy in the film, said recently on the LaunchLeft podcast that it "was not a good experience," and almost led her to quit acting.

"I have to be careful with what I say and how I talk about it. It wasn't the best experience making it and I got to this place, that I still live in, that I don't want to act unless I'm doing stuff that I feel like I have to do. So after making that film, I decided, 'OK, I'm just not going to act anymore unless it's something that I feel that way about.'"

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)

We liked Jessica Biel in the lead, and the entire cast, really, but this 30-years-later remake of the 1972 original wasn't necessary, and modern filmmaking techniques take away from the grimy effectiveness of the original.

Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel, co-creators of the original, returned for this one, and we're glad they made some money, but the original is the one we'll always remember.

Psycho (1998)

Van Sant’s shot-for-shot update of the Hitchcock classic is widely regarded as one of the least necessary remakes of all time. Using Joseph Stefano’s original script, the new and unimproved Psycho makes a crucial miscasting: Vince Vaughn as Norman Bates. Anthony Perkins, the original Norman, had a natural boy-next-door quality, which made the film’s twist ending that much more surprising and rewarding.

By contrast, in the remake, the looming, neurotic Vaughn seems off his rocker as soon as he speaks, which makes the film significantly less creepy. The story also loses much of its power by being shot in color, as opposed to the black-and-white original.

Ironically, that shower scene — with the late Anne Heche as Marion Crane — isn’t nearly as scary when it’s in color. Still, the whole concept is interesting enough.

Carrie (2013)

This original 1976 Carrie is almost impossible to match in terms of creepiness and sheer horror — the adaptation of Stephen King's first novel includes, famously, a literal bucket of blood. And the grainy '70s film adds to the near-nauseating menace of Brian De Palma's classic.

Then there's the additional thrill of seeing John Travolta — looking his most young and wholesome — doing unspeakably cruel things just for a laugh.

The 2013 Carrie remake was fine, and we definitely understand the concept of pairing acclaimed Boys Don't Cry director Kimberly Peirce with fantastic actresses Chloë Grace Moretz as Carrie and Julianne Moore as her repressive mom.

But the original Carrie didn't work because it had A-listers. Like Last House on the Left, it worked because it seemed to come out of nowhere, with a shockingly new cynicism that was genuinely scary, and seemed to herald a new, crueler way of life.

Liked Our List of Horror Remakes Nobody Really Needed?

You may like our list of Old Scary Movies That Are Still Terrifying Today, including some familiar faces from above, or this list of Gen X Movie Stars Gone Too Soon.

Main image: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. New Line Cinema

Curl up with your favorite black cat, look out for ladders, and enjoy choosing from among these films.

Here are 13 classic slasher movies..

Psycho (1960)

Slasher movies are generally defined as a subgenre of horror where a killer (or sometimes killers) stalks a number of victims and takes them out one by one, generally using something sharp.

Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho is often cited as the first slasher film, even though it doesn't start as one — its a taut relationship drama about a girl gone bad (Janet Leigh) who steals $40,000 from her boss to start a new life with her boyfriend. Then she stops at the wrong hotel, takes a shower — and the movie makes a dramatic shift in genre.

Film would never be the same.

Black Christmas (1974)

How timely: A perfect slasher movie for Friday the 13th and the holidays.

People sometimes say the Canadian slasher Black Christmas was the first North American slasher, but we say no: Both Psycho and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre got there first. (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre came out just in time for Halloween, and Black Christmas came out just in time for, of course, Christmas.)

Still, this movie by Bob Clark — whose varied list of films would eventually include Porky's, A Christmas Story and Baby Geniuses — established for North American audiences the very familiar setup of a group of young women, who often attend college, play on a sports team, or cheerlead together — getting attacked by a mysterious creepy stranger.

Black Christmas stands out from other slasher movies with a stellar cast that includes Margot Kidder (future Lois Lane in the Superman films), Keir Dullea (who just six years earlier had starred in 2001) and Olivia Hussey (who starred in Romeo and Juliet in 1968, the same year Dullea appeared in 2001.)

Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

We kind of hesitate to call the Texas Chainsaw Massacre a slasher, because slasher implies a knife, but we're going with it because chainsaws have blades. Very fast blades.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, with director Tobe Hooper's interesting parallels between human victims and farm animals, was one of the first slasher movies to offer social commentary. You can read it as a plea against eating meat, if you're so inclined, but we see it as a commentary on the Vietnam War.

The fact that many different people read the film in so many different ways is a testament to its power.

Halloween (1978)

This John Carpenter film, starring Janet Leigh's daughter Jamie Lee Curtis, kicked off both Curtis' illustrious career and the slasher movies craze of the 1980s. Carpenter and co-writer/producer had the chilling notion to open Halloween with a sequence from the perspective of the killer, making the audience unwittingly complicit in Michael Myers' killing spree.

As artful as Halloween was, many of its imitators cared less about provocative filmmaking techniques than they did about accruing the highest body count possible. What makes Halloween so appealing (and hard to beat) is how it takes its time establishing the reality of Haddonfield, Illinois (named for the lovely New Jersey town where Hill grew up) and its relentlessly chilly atmospherics.

Friday the 13th (1980)

Inspired by the success of Halloween, Friday the 13th created a dark, murky, dreamy scenes of horrendous campground violence inflicted on unsuspecting campers who didn't always have the best judgement.

Of course we all remember the film series for Jason, the hockey-masked killer, but Jason isn't the killer in the original Friday the 13th, as Drew Barrymore's character was brutally reminded in the opening scene of another movie on this list.

For better or worse, this is one of the first movie people think of when they think of slasher movies. And it brought us Kevin Bacon, who is zero degrees of separation from Jeannine Taylor in the image above.

Slumber Party Massacre (1980)

We know: The title of this movie doesn't really scream "Criterion Collection." But the film turned up on the Criterion Channel recently because of what Criterion describes as a "smart, subversive, and lightly satirical spin on the 1980s slasher formula."

Slasher movies are frequently accused of misogyny — Carol J. Clover's perfectly titled book Men, Women and Chainsaws has a lot to say on the subject — but Criterion notes that Slumber Party Massacre, by director Amy Holden Jones, was a written by lesbian feminist author Rita Mae Brown.

It's an interesting slasher in that it includes many gratuitous elements, but also seems acutely aware of how it utilizes them. And it's a delightfully suspenseful, beautifully controlled movie — right up to all the massacring.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

Wes Craven's Nightmare on Elm Street changed up the slasher genre in several ways, including the introduction of a killer who preys on his victims in their dreams.

Endlessly imaginative, and flawlessly executed by writer-director Wes Craven, it also gave us a blade-gloved, burn survivor killer in Freddie Krueger (Robert Englund), billed in the original credits as "Fred Krueger," a smart and courageous heroine in Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) and a promising start for a new young actor named Johnny Depp.

It opened to extremely good reviews — especially for its genre, which wasn't very well-respected at the time — and of course spawned many spinoffs and sequels, as well as a 2010 remake.

Slumber Party Massacre II (1987)

Maybe the most fun slasher movie ever made, Slumber Party Massacre II picks up five years after the original with a weekend getaway that includes Courtney Bates (Crystal Bernard), the younger sister of Valerie Bates (Robin Stille) in the original Slumber Party Massacre.

What makes Slumber Party Massacre 2 stand out as a camp classic and fabulous '80s time capsule is the killer — played by Atanas Ilitch — a kind of rockabilly psycho who dances like Michael Jackson and takes out his victims with a guitar drill.

Unlike many serious-acting slasher movies, this one is the epitome of dumb fun, and you have to be really smart to pull off something this perfectly ridiculous. It holds an honored place on our list of '80s Movies Only Cool Kids Remember.

Scream (1996)

Written by Kevin Williamson and directed by Nightmare on Elm Street mastermind Wes Craven, Scream took to heart all the years of academic deconstruction of slasher movies to make a poppy, thrilling meta horror movie that is as Gen X as Gen X gets. It's aware of all the tropes it enlists, but also punctures them in smart and surprising ways — and it's edge-of-your-dorm-futon entertaining from the very first scene, the aforementioned Drew Barrymore scene.

Scream's decision to horribly kill off its most famous face within the first 12 minutes of the film rewrote the rules of slasher movies, and established that audiences would need to sharpen up — the days of dumb slasher movies ended with Scream.

I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)

Another Kevin Williamson-scripted slasher, I Know What You Did Last Summer has also popped up recently on Criterion. It stands out as a remarkably grounded, well-constructed thriller that is almost impossible to predict, with Hitchcockian twists that put its leads — especially the phenomenally engaging Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt) through an emotional wringer as they try to avoid getting the hook.

The top-notch cast also includes an excellent Anne Heche, Ryan Phillippe, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Freddie Prinze Jr.

And who says slasher movies aren't romantic? Prinze and Gellar, married more than 20 years, met on the set.

X (2022)

Our favorite slasher movie in years, this Ti West film, set during the filming of a 1970s adult movie, is heavily inspired by the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and serves as a very modern meditation on sexual guilt. While in many past slashers, young people were killed for giving in to their sexual impulses, in X, sexual repression and shame are the source of the violence.

The magnificent cast of rising stars includes Jenna Ortega and Mia Goth, who is especially good in a double role.

Goth reprised the part of one of her characters in the excellent X sequel Pearl, and plays her other character in MaXXXine, which came out this year.

It's also on our list of Films About the Adult Film Industry That Don't Sugarcoat Anything.

Terrifier 2 (2022)

By far the most disturbing movie on this list, Terrifier 2 was a runaway hit in large part because of many reports of people getting sick or passing out during screenings. The film capitalized on the hype, and audiences signed up for the endurance test of getting through the movie.

We like to feel stuff, and Terrifier 2 definitely delivers in that regard — there's a whole meta narrative going on in the background as you wonder if the film's writer-director, Damien Leone, is a genuinely bad guy for wanting to inflict all this stuff on audiences. Watch our interview with him and decide for yourself.

You may also enjoy the cool narrative about Art the Clown finally meeting his match in the form of Lauren LaVera avenging angel, Sienna Shaw (above).

Liked Our List of 13 Classic Slasher Movies to Watch This Friday the 13th?

You might also like this list of Oscar Winners Who Got Started in Horror Movies.

Main image: Friday the 13th. Paramount.

"We would rent movies all the time, and my mom really preferred that we rented them from the Nashville Public Library because it was free, and weirdly there was a very strange collection of art house movies," she said Friday at a Provincetown International Film Festival panel about first-time filmmaking.

"So I saw Polyester and Pecker and Cemetery Man and But I'm a Cheerleader at a really young age, just based off the VHS boxes. And my parents kind of let us watch whatever we wanted from the library without worrying it, because they thought it was like educational."

The public library was educational not just for Sriram, but also for her fellow panelists, Jimmy director Yashaddai Owens and Plainclothes director Carmen Emmi. All three writer-directors talked about sharing an appreciation for public libraries that helped them become filmmakers.

"Let's take a moment and hear it for libraries," noted panel moderator Eugene Hernandez, director of the Sundance Film Festival.

For Sriram to reference John Waters' 1991 Polyester and 1998 Pecker at PIFF was something of a full circle moment: Waters is a patron saint of the festival, who turns up for screenings, hosts wild fundraisers, and, on Saturday, will interview Ari Aster.

Sriram, Owens and Emmi noted that in addition to resources like the library-connected Kanopy app, which lets viewers stream films for free, libraries offer a litany of opportunities for filmmakers, both in terms of resources and inspiration.

Owens said he outlined Jimmy, a narrative that imagines the life of young James Baldwin in Paris, at the New York Public Library's flagship location, the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building near Bryant Park.

"You go to a library, see everyone with their phones off and kind of studious, in tandem, and it's like a force, and it's a spirit that we all pick up on. And it was really helpful for me just to go and mean business about what I wanted to do," he told MovieMaker after the panel.

Also Read: Say Yes to the Provincetown International Film Festival

Emmi, meanwhile, recalled that he spent his early years as a filmmaker at the Theatre on Film and Tape Archive at the The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. The director, whose film is about an undercover cop ordered to bust men having sex in public places, would both read plays and watch recorded productions.

"They have plays that are archived, and that's how I learned how to write. Because a lot of the Broadway shows are so expensive now, when I moved to New York in 2018 I couldn't really afford to go to the theater as much as I wanted to. But I would go to Lincoln Center and I would just watch plays," he explained.

The event was held at the beloved Provincetown entertainment and hospitality complex The Crown and Anchor, and if you needed a reminder that libraries are all about public service, you could walk a few blocks to the lovely and historic Provincetown Public Library, one of the few buildings in the world that advertises, prominently on its sign, that it offers public restrooms. Few things will garner so much goodwill in a beach town crowded with tourists.

Given that it's a library, that's only the beginning of its services: It also offers a fantastic selection of books, including about Provincetown itself, a landing site for the Pilgrims that has since become an arts and LGBTQ+ mecca. And its "library of things" invites patrons to check out a wide array of usual gadgets, tools and sources of entertainment and education.

But times being as the are, libraries are under attack — as one of the film's playing at PIFF, The Librarians, reminds us. The award-winning documentary, from director Kim A. Snyder, profiles brave librarians standing up against book bans and other forms of censorship.

"In other countries, this would never happen," said Owens. "People don't settle at all. We have to stop settling and see the collective force that we have."

Main image: The Provincetown Public Library. MovieMaker.

As wild as it may sound, Mel Brooks announced Thursday that Spaceballs 2 is coming in 2027 — 40 years after the original Spaceballs. 2027 also happens to be the year that the now 98-year-old Brooks, one of the greatest comic minds of any era, will turn 101. (His birthday is June 28.)

As Brooks said in his announcement, "I told you we'd be back."

And now, here are 12 behind the scenes stories of Spaceballs — a sci-fi comedy that flies through jokes at ludicrous speed.

Mel Brooks Was Inspired by His Son's Love of Star Wars

Spaceballs riffs on many sci-fi classics, but it especially parodies the original 1977 Star Wars. He got the idea for Spaceballs, he wrote in his memoir, All About Me!, because "my son Max loved the Star Wars movies. I would take him to various showings of them. And for his tenth birthday, he had a Star Wars-themed birthday party."

That gave Brooks an idea: "Science fiction! Now there's a genre I haven't wrecked yet."

He had of course already taken on Westerns with Blazing Saddles and horror films with Young Frankenstein, both in 1974 — as well as several other genres.

Mel Brooks Takes Some Credit for Star Wars

If there hadn't been a Star Wars, there wouldn't have been a Spaceballs. But if there hadn't been a Young Frankenstein, there might not have been a Star Wars — at least not as we know it. Let us explain.

Mel Brooks writes in his memoir, All About Me! that 20th Fox executive Alan Ladd's decision to greenlight Brooks' 1974 hit Young Frankenstein helped him earn enough clout to be “in a position to greenlight over three hundred films during his illustrious career, including High Anxiety (1977), Star Wars (1977), Alien (1977), Blade Runner (1982), A Fish Called Wanda (1988) and Thelma and Louise (1991)."

Of course, Spaceballs borrows from Alien, too. As well as many other sci-fi classics.

Spaceballs Was Also Inspired by It Happened One Night

One of the biggest reference points for Spaceballs wasn't a sci-fi film, but a Frank Capra classic, 1934's It Happened One Night. The film was the first to sweep the top five Oscar categories — Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor and Best Actress.

The film follows an heiress (Claudette Colbert) who flees her dull groom on her wedding day and falls for a cool regular guy played by Clark Gable. "We took that same basic plot and shot it into space!" Brooks wrote in his memoir.

In Spaceballs, Princess Vespa of Planet Druidia (Daphne Zuniga) flees her dull groom, Prince Valium, on her wedding day, and falls for a cool regular guy named Lone Starr (Bill Pullman).

Daphne Zuniga Wasn't a Mel Brooks Fan

Prior to working with Brooks, Zuniga (in a promotional image, above) said she found his movie parodies "too crass and just not funny," according to Turner Classic Movies. But she changed her mind after her Spaceballs experience.

"I have this image of Mel as totally wacko and out to lunch. And he is. But he's also really perceptive, real sensitive in ways that make actors respond," she said.

Brooks recalls that when he offered her the part of Vespa, she said, "I don't know. I haven't done much comedy." To which he replied, "That could be a plus!" (He explained that part of good comedy is playing it straight.)

Zuniga, of course, turned out to be very funny in Spaceballs, mostly because her character seemed to be taking all the absurdity around her quite seriously.

Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks Turned Down the Part of Lone Starr

Both Tom Hanks and Tom Cruise turned down the part of Lone Starr, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

You can see how they looked around the time of 1987's Spaceballs — that's Hanks, left, in a 1988 promotional image for Big, and Cruise, right, in a 1988 promotional image for Top Gun — and imagine what might have been.

The part, of course, went to a then-little-known Bill Pullman.

John Candy Ad-Libbed One of the Best Jokes

John Candy played Lonestarr's Chewbacca-like mawg (half-man, half-dog) companion, Barf. (Spaceballs is not a subtle movie.) Brooks says he ad-libbed one of the movie's best lines when he and Lone Starr's flying RV crash-lands in the desert:

"Well, that's gonna leave a mark."

Chris Farley later borrowed the line in 1996's Tommy Boy.

Rick Moranis Improvised Another Great Moment

Candy's SCTV colleague, Rick Moranis, played Dark Helmet, the movie's ridiculous version of Darth Vader. Brooks said Moranis "brilliantly improvised" another of the film's best moments, when Dark Helmet is caught playing with Spaceballs action figures of himself, Lone Starr, and Princess Vespa.

"Knock on my door! Knock next time!" he yells at the inteloper, Colonel Sandurz (George Wyner). "Did you see anything?"

"No sir!" Sandurz replies. "I didn't see you playing with your dolls again!"

George Lucas Had One Objection

Speaking of dolls: As a courtesy, Mel Brooks showed the Spaceballs script to Star Wars creator George Lucas. As Brooks noted in All About Me!, Lucas told him he was a fan of Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein and had no only one caveat:

"He explained that if I made toys of my Spaceball characters they would look a lot like Star Wars action figures. And that would be a no-no for his lawyers and his studio's business affairs department. So he gave me his blessing to make my funny satiric takeoff on Star Wars as long as I promised that I would not sell any action figures."

That Talk With George Lucas Inspired Another Great Joke

Lucas' no-action-figures rule inspired another of the funniest scenes in the film, when Brooks' wise version of Yoda — called "just plain Yogurt" — reveals his secret weapon:

"Merchandising! Merchandising is where the real money from the movie is made! Spaceballs the T-shirt! Spaceballs the coloring book! Spaceballs the lunchbox! Spaceballs the breakfast cereal! Spaceballs the flame thrower! The kids really love that one."

The Desert Was a Problem

In the scenes parodying the Tatooine desert sequences in Star Wars, which were shot in Yuma, Arizona, Brooks and his team faced a problem familiar to all moviemakers who shoot on sand: Removing the tracks from the previous take.

"We had to get a blower or a sand broom out there to make sure that the sand was ready for the next take," Brooks wrote in All About Me!

The desert shoot was hardest on professional mime Lorene Yarnell, who played the movie's version of C-3PO, Dot Matrix, who was voiced by Joan Rivers.

Spaceballs Inspired Elon Musk

Many investors have been inspired by sci-fi, but perhaps only Elon Musk has been inspired by Spaceballs. Musk's Tesla cars feature a "ludicrous mode" that launches them from zero to 60 in under three seconds.

It is inspired by "ludicrous speed" in Spaceballs, which is a joke on "lightspeed" in Star Wars and "warp speed" in Star Trek.

The Wizard of Oz Connection

Spaceballs was shot partly on MGM's Studio 15, which was the same location where The Wizard of Oz was shot.

"Sometimes when I was directing, I would imagine seeing Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, Jack Haley and Bert Lahr all cavorting around the stage," Brooks wrote in All About Me!

OK, but can you sync Spaceballs to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon?

After Spaceballs

Spaceballs wasn't Mel Brooks' biggest hit — Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein had far better returns — but it soon developed a devoted fanbase.

It inspired Spaceballs: The Series, an adult animated show, and also inspires countless people who see Brooks out in public to shout, "May the Schwartz be with you!" a beloved line from the film, as Brooks recounts in All About Me!

Meanwhile, Max Brooks, whose tenth birthday party inspired Spaceballs, went on to create his own sci-fi masterpiece. His 2006 novel book World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, was the basis for the terrific 2013 Brad Pitt film World War Z.

Excited for Spaceballs 2?

You might also like our looks behind the scenes of two other Mel Brooks classics: Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein, the film that, according to Brooks, helped pave the way for Spaceballs.

Spaceballs 2 is coming to a galaxy near you in 2027.

Main image: Spaceballs. MGM

“He's arguably the most successful chef of all time, just in terms of the footprint of his global network of restaurants and now hotels, and he's become a luxury brand in food and hospitality, and that's pretty rare,” Tyrnauer tells MovieMaker. 

“No one's really taken a close look at Nobu. I mean, he's been covered in the press for decades now, but this is a really fascinating, intricate world. He's extraordinarily accomplished. He's changed cuisine with an enormous amount of invention. I don't think people know that these dishes really originated with him.”

Following its world premiere at Telluride, the film made its debut at the Tribeca Film Festival on Wednesday, bringing Nobu back to where it all began: with the first Nobu restaurant in Tribeca in 1994, with business partner Robert De Niro, who is also the co-founder of the festival. The film plays again Friday and Sunday before a theatrical opening in New York on June 27 and a national rollout beginning July 4. 

In the film, Tyrnauer traces the chef’s journey from his troubled childhood in Japan to his culinary experiences in Peru and Alaska. We spoke with the director, whose previous films include 2009's Valentino: The Last Emperor and 2019's Where's My Roy Cohn?, about the difficulties of tracking Matsuhisa around the globe, translation challenges for the multilingual project, and capturing the beauty of the food the chef is so fussy about perfecting. 

Amber Dowling: How did you gain Nobu’s trust for this kind of in-depth look at his life? 

Matt Tyrnauer: He had agreed in principle to do a film and when I agreed to make it, we had lunch at Nobu Malibu and got along immediately. He was very open, very accessible, very generous with his time. What I saw with him is that once he agrees to do something, he's a perfectionist and he does it to his full ability. He'll spend as much time as he needs to to do it, which is not unlike his core mission of perfecting cuisine.

I noticed a lot of integrity in him, and I've seen this in other really accomplished people that I've either written about or made films about. They have a certain work ethic and dedication and focus. He really did bring that to his participation in shoot days, and there were many of them.

Also Read: Pinch Director Uttera Singh Finds Healing in Trauma With Tribeca Debut

Amber Dowling: The film travels to several countries to keep up with Nobu. What kinds of challenges did that present?

Matt Tyrnauer: There were logistical challenges in terms of just moving people around. I like to work with a pretty light footprint and not heavy equipment, because I like to be nimble. But in this case, we needed enough lights and the pretty fancy cameras, because his world is a world of beauty, and shooting food is specialized. So there were two types of kits we used, a cinema vérité kit, and a food beauty kit. So logistically, it presented some issues that way,

He flies private for the most part and he needs to, because of his schedule. So sometimes we would hop on his plane, and that helped a lot.

Amber Dowling: Did you need to hire local crew or was everyone able to travel with you?

Matt Tyrnauer: For the most part, it was the same crew. For me that’s always best, because you need to socialize. When you're basically moving in with someone for a year, you become a part of their life. That's the joy of doing this, and it's a particular world you build for yourself. So there's a kind of film world that is an overlay of the subject’s world, and when things are going well, you integrate and it's an organic process to embed yourself and become a fly on the wall. So you have to all get along, and you have to know when to disappear and appear. If you're taking up a lot of space, you have to learn how to be natural. 

Matt Tyrnauer on Beauty Shots in the Nobu Documentary

Amber Dowling: Did you need to learn any new skills in order to capture the food in all its glory?

Matt Tyrnauer: Shooting food beauty shots is not my core skill set, but I have great DPs I work with. In this case, it was Toby Thiermann and Nick Albert, and they lived up to the challenge and helped me a lot. We were suspending cameras over sushi bars and doing some tricks of the trade to get different angles that would show the composition, because a lot of Nobu’s artistry is in the composition of the plate. That’s a big part of the movie. 

Amber Dowling: Nobu alternates between English and Japanese in the film’s interviews. What was that process like?

Matt Tyrnauer: Nobu is trilingual and speaks Japanese, Spanish and English. His Spanish is arguably better than his English. I can understand some Spanish. I needed, obviously, to have the Japanese translated for me entirely and occasionally during interviews I would have it simultaneously translated so I could understand. He answered in English and in Japanese, and sometimes I used Japanese takes because he's much more articulate in Japanese than English.

He's quite articulate in English, but with a kind of unique vocabulary that he's works in. So we did all three languages, and then we chose where they would go. Some scenes were just in Japanese and we subtitled them, but some takes were in two languages, and we chose which one to use. It was very complicated actually, but I really like having the switching back and forth.

Amber Dowling: In choosing which celebrities to use for the Nobu documentary, did you have to self-edit to stay focused, given how many frequent his restaurants?

Matt Tyrnauer: I never really gave it a lot of thought. I mean, I acknowledge that any restaurant that's really famous has to trade on famous people dining there. It's just part of the business in big cities, especially New York and Los Angeles. So Nobu comes up in L.A. at the height of Hollywood celebrity culture. And his business partner is a major movie star too, Robert De Niro, but I kind of didn't pay a lot of attention to it.

We happened to be shooting one day at Nobu Malibu, where a lot of famous people do eat, and Cindy Crawford and Randy Gerber, who are devoted clients of Nobu, showed up by coincidence. It wasn't planned at all and on the fly we asked whether they would be on camera. We kind of invaded the deck out there, and we had cameras and lights, and the restaurant was going full tilt around us.

I have to say they were great. Nobu made what he calls Cindy rice, which was a dish he named after her. It's a traditional Japanese tempura dish, but he made it for her as a surprise, and we captured it.

Nobu is now playing at the Tribeca Festival.

Main image: Nobu Matsuhisa in Nobu.

The Sabrina Carpenter album sparked an immediate backlash from fans who saw it as regressive and degrading. But fans defended it as satirizing images of female servitude and mocking so-called trad wife aesthetics.

It seems that Man's Best Friend is rather skillfully playing the game previously played by the likes of Madonna, Britney Spears, and countless other artists — using sexual images while ostensibly satirizing such images. And it's a very old trick in Hollywood, where some of the best movie satires are occasionally indistinguishable from the kinds of movies they satirize. A film may work as a satire of horror, for example, while still being quite scary.

So with that said, here are 13 movie satires that have it both ways.

Kentucky Fried Movie

Kentucky Fried Movie is the film that that started it all for Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams and David Zucker, the team behind Airplane and The Naked Gun films. It consists of a string of dead-on movie parodies — basically making fun of every popular genre in the 1970s.

The most over the top is a parody of sexploitation films that was, at the young age when we saw it, probably the dirtiest thing we'd ever seen. It includes all variety of shocking perversions, and gets fairly explicit. It's funny, sure, but also quite salacious.

It continues to make us confused.

Robocop (1987)

Paul Verhoeven is the master of movie satires that have it both ways. The Dutch filmmaker arrived in the United States in the '80s and quickly committed to outdoing the excessive sex and violence he saw on American screens.

Robocop is a masterpiece, as satire goes — it appeals to audiences tough-on-crime wish-fulfillment fantasies while also noting that corporate, mechanized crimefighting may be more dangerous than crime itself.

It successfully anticipated the potential flaws of AI-based law enforcement — does anyone really want to be pulled over by a drone? — and arguably also anticipated the rise of the for-profit prison system.

At the same time, though, it's a wonderfully silly movie about a half-man half-robot trying to clean the scum off the streets of New Detroit. And one of our favorite movies ever.

Starship Troopers

Starship Troopers, another Verhoeven film, nailed its satire so successfully that some critics didn't even catch the satire.

The New York Times Janet Maslin, for example, dismissively wrote, "Where exactly are the hordes of moviegoers who will exclaim: ''Great idea! Let's go see the one about the cute young co-ed army and the big bugs from space.'"

Yes, Starship Troopers is the best movie ever made about a cute co-ed army and big bugs from space. But it's also relentlessly mocks jingoistic, fake patriotism and our tendency to dehumanize anyone with whom we disagree.

Scream

Written by Kevin Williamson and directed by master of horror Wes Craven, Scream deconstructs slasher movies even while serving up supremely competent chills and kills.

It also changed horror forever, and for the better: It was almost impossible to make an unironic slasher movie after Scream made it a requirement to include at least one character in every group of slasher movie friends to point out tropes they had better not fall into.

Even movies that play it very straight are now in a kind of pact with the audience: We all know these tropes. Now here's how this movie will undermine them.

Slumber Party Massacre (1982)

Though Scream did the have-it-both ways slasher movie satire the best, Slumber Party Massacre got there first. The first of the four films in the franchise (including two sequels and a revamp) was written by lesbian feminist author Rita Mae Brown, who set out to satirize slasher movies, not celebrate them.

But under the astute direction of Amy Holden Jones, Slumber Party Massacre turned out to be one of the best slasher movies ever made, as well as a knowing satire of other films popular at the time, like Friday the 13th.

It also captures early '80s Southern California — where we grew up watching movies we weren't supposed to — with a keenly accurate eye.

The next film in the series, Slumber Party II, goes even further into satire with a villain (Atanas Ilitch) who dances like a cross between Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson and kills with a drill-shaped red electric guitar.

American Psycho (2000)

Another of our all-time favorite movies, American Psycho is a sharp satire of '80s yuppiedom that also makes '80s yuppiedom seem... pretty glamorous, actually. Aside from all the chainsaw murders, of course.

Christian Bale played Wall Street serial killer Patrick Bateman as anything but cool — "We looked at him as an alien who landed in the unabashedly capitalist New York of the ’80s, and looked around and said, ‘How do I perform like a successful male in this world?,’" Bale once told MovieMaker.

And while his behavior is reprehensible, he has really good abs. And taste in business cards. We don't root for him, but he's hypnotically amusing to watch.

Tropic Thunder (2008)

Tropic Thunder isn't so much a satire of war movies as a satire of actors who take on showy, ludicrous roles in pursuit of acclaim. One of the joys of the movie is that it allows to take on a variety of showy, ludicrous roles while playing actors playing showy, ludicrous roles.

The most extreme example is Robert Downey Jr. as Kirk Lazarus, an Australian Oscar winner who undergoes "pigmentation alteration: surgery in order to play a Black character, Staff Sergeant Lincoln Osiris.

But Ben Stiller also gets to shine as Tugg Speedman, who has made the mistake of committing too hard to his role as "Simple Jack."

Austin Powers (1997)

The James Bond movies are so full of characters with names like Xenia Onatopp and Holly Goodhead that they're basically self-satires.

But Mike Myers sixties spy spoof classic makes fun of the excessive sexualization of female characters by surrounding Myers' defiantly average Austin "Danger" Powers with scantily-clad "fembots" and Elizabeth Hurley.

It holds up remarkably well. And it remains high on our list of the funniest comedies we've ever seen.

Thanksgiving (2023)

Another comical sendup of slasher movies that is also a very effective slasher, with creative methods of dispatching cast members and a quite solid twist.

The ensemble cast in the Eli Roth film includes Patrick Dempsey as a sheriff in Plymouth, Massachusetts, where a Black Friday riot at a local big box story inspires a mystery man to dress up as Puritan town founder John Carver... and start carving.

Carver does a little cooking, too. It's all overdone, but deliberately so.

Planet Terror (2007)

We got our first look at Thanksgiving in a trailer that appeared in Grindhouse, a curious and very cool 2007 release that paired Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror with Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof.

Let's start with Planet Terror, which makes fun of grotesque, violent B-movies while outdoing most of them in terms of violence and grotesquerie. It centers on a biochemical outbreak that creates zombielike hordes, and its heroine is a machine-gun-legged go-go dancer named Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan).

Are the gross-outs effective? Funny you should ask. We saw this one hungover, on opening day, and had to run out of the theater to throw up, several times. That seems to go beyond satire.

Death Proof (2007)

Quentin Tarantino opens this one with a shot of a woman's feet, which is the first sign that nothing — even his own suspected predilections — will be off-limits.

It works as an excellent satire of those movies where bad men terrorize young women, or just as an excellent movie about a bad men terrorizing young women.

It also has its fun with various gearhead '70s movies, including Gone in Sixty Seconds, and dozens of other underground pop-cultural references Tarantino knows like the back of a video store.

Machete (2010)

Are you picking up on our fondness for Grindhouse? Like Thanksgiving, this film originated as one of the film's in-movie trailers.

Anchored by Danny Trejo as the titular Mexican cop-turned-avenger, it has a B-movie spirit and A-list cast, including Robert De Niro, Jessica Alba and Don Johnston.

It's gloriously silly — especially a scene where a character explains the length of intestines before we see his point graphically illustrated — but it also contains sharp social commentary about race-baiting and scapegoating. We love it, and also lined up for 2013's Machete Kills.

Companion (2025)

We don't want to reveal anything about Companion, starring Sophie Thatcher (above) and Jack Quaid.

We'll just say that it starts off seeming like a rom-com — it's about a newish couple going to meet the guy's friends at a lake house — but then turns into something else.

It's a note-for-note perfect parody of rom-coms, but then starts satirizing other genres as well. To even list them here would spoil the movie for you.

Liked This List of 12 Movie Satires That Do the Same Thing They Satirize

You may also enjoy this list of 12 Rad '80s Movies Only Cool Kids Remember.

And for more on the two sides of the Sabrina Carpenter Man's Best Friend debate, check out this thoughtful writeup.

Main image: Sabrina Carpenter, Man's Best Friend. Universal Music Group.

Perhaps you may wonder what we mean by a post-apocalyptic movie. We're referring to any film that takes place after the fall of civilization, whether due to a nuclear war, or any other cataclysmic event.

There are different flavors of post-apocalyptic movies, from sci-fi horror stories to silly comedies. Many are darkly entertaining, though the best tend to be philosophical — and perhaps even to inspire us to avoid destroying ourselves.

And with that, here are the 12 best post-apocalyptic movies we've ever seen.

The Matrix (1999)

The premise of The Matrix feels realer every day: Robots have created a fantasy world to distract humans from the real world. (Our only quibble with that notion is that the robots are using humans as power sources, and... why? Wouldn't electricity work better?)

Be it the bullet-time special effects or the reinvention of Keanu Reeves, The Matrix was monumental. A lot of the action stuff still holds up, and there are fun moments to be found in the computer simulation of it all.

One of the coolest things about The Matrix, like a few other films on this list, is that it doesn't immediately reveal itself to be a post-apocalyptic movie. Neo's world looks a lot like our own... at first.

12 Monkeys (1995)

It’s impressive to turn an adaptation of an experimental French short film into a hit sci-fi movie, but Terry Gilliam did it. You might say, “Sure, but he had Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt!” Yes, but this was just at the beginning of Pitt’s prominence. This is one of the films that broke him through into the mainstream.

In 12 Monkeys, a widespread pandemic has wiped out most of human civilization. Humans have access to time travel, though, so they send a convict back in time. Crucially, they don't try to change the future — that’s not possible. They simply want to be able to mitigate the death going forward.

Sadly, then they send Willis’ prisoner back too early, and everything gets messed up.

Also Read: The 12 Most Voyeuristic Movies We've Ever Watched

A Quiet Place (2018)

A Quiet Place takes the unique frame of just focusing on a family, and notes that children are, well, the only hope for the future.

John Krasinski starred alongside his wife Emily Blunt, and also directed. This is the first full-on horror film on this list, but horror and the apocalypse go hand in hand.

Aliens have come to Earth with a taste for humans. However, their senses are poor, including being effectively blind, but have a tremendous sense of hearing. Survival means being quiet. Silent even. Sure, that makes it easy to ratchet up the tension, but you have to execute. A Quiet Place definitely does that.

Children of Men (2006)

What if the apocalyptic event was anodyne and slow moving? It’s not a shark biting you in half, but a boa constrictor slowly squeezing the life out of you. For two decades, no new children have been born. This has caused society to slowly unravel. The youngest humans have become celebrities. The world is ceasing to function, and falling into war.

Clive Owen plays a man who, you’ll never believe this, has grown cynical. Then, he finds out something remarkable. There is a pregnant woman.

Now, there is almost nothing he won’t do to save her and her unborn child. Directed by the acclaimed, Oscar-winning Alfonso Cuaron, Children of Men is high-quality filmmaking.

Night of the Comet (1984)

We figured a cult classic should be in the mix, and Night of the Comet is our choice. It’s the kind of movie that has Mary Woronov in a supporting role. If that sentence means anything to you, well, you’ve probably already seen Night of the Comet, or at the very least are running out to watch it. It’s kind of comedic in the way it winks at sci-fi disaster movies of yore.

A comet’s fly-by proves fatal, turning the vast majority of people into dust. Some are left dying more slowly, becoming almost crazed zombies. Thanks to the protection of solid steel, though, two Valley girl sisters survive, as does a truck driver.

Now they have to try and survive. What’s impressive is that Night of the Comet manages to wink without feeling wink-y, you know? Also, Catherine Mary Stewart is a delight as one of the leads.

Also Read: 10 Movie Sex Scenes Somebody Should Have Stopped

WALL-E (2008)

A masterpiece of show-don't-tell filmmaking. WALL-E is also the gentlest movie on this list by a wide margin. WALL-E is a sweet movie about a couple of lonesome robots who just might be able to resurrect a long-trash planet Earth.

It starts simply, with no dialogue: Humans have abandoned Earth because it has been polluted to the point of being uninhabitable. WALL-E has been left behind to clean up all the garbage. Then another robot, EVE, arrives. Thus begins a robotic love story, animated majestically.

When we finally meet the humans, fairly late in the film, they're not entirely impressive. But WALL-E and EVE rescue them anyway.

The Omega Man (1971)

Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend has been turned into a movie three times, and parodied in a Simpsons episode as well. Vincent Price was in The Last Man on Earth in 1964, and Will Smith starred in a 2007 version called I Am Legend, but The Omega Man is the best of the bunch.

This is the first Charlton Heston movie on our list, and he was no stranger to post-apocalyptic movies. His character has spent years believing he is alone. Well, alone other than some violent mutated plague survivors.

But what if he's not the last man on Earth? What if there is more left for him than isolation and killing mutants?

Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (Tie) (1984)

Hear us out: We'll grant you that much of the action in the Terminator movies takes place before the apocalypse. But the films also give us glimpses of Skynet’s assault on humankind, and the charred world that results from said attack.

We would be remiss not to include at least one Terminator film, given how often people worry about the possibility of a Skynet-like entity wiping out life on our planet.

Also Read: 11 Bad Sequels That Should Never Have Been Made

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)

Two film icons joined forces to make A.I. a reality. Stanley Kubrick worked on adapting “Supertoys Last All Summer Long” into a film for years. He felt like he needed technology to advance enough to make it.

Eventually, Kubrick realized he had gotten too old to work on it any longer, and in 1995 handed the project over to Steven Spielberg. When Kubrick died in 1999, Spielberg finally was able to get the project rolling.

Haley Joel Osment plays an android programmed to love who is acquired to replace a dead child. Unaccepted, he finds himself on a journey alongside other androids. Eventually it takes us far, far into a future beyond the existence of humanity.

At the time, A.I. was accepted a little tepidly. Now, many consider it a sci-fi classic.

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Pretty much every zombie movie is a post-apocalyptic movie, and the modern conception of the zombie movie began with Night of the Living Dead, which depicts the first hours of the end of civilization as we know it.

George A. Romero took a budget a little over $100,000 and skills learned working on industrial films and made a horror movie in his hometown of Pittsburgh. While the movie doesn’t use the word “zombie,” it so clearly is the progenitor of the zombie genre.

At the time, people didn’t know what to make of Night of the Living Dead. Now, it’s considered a seminal horror movie. Of course, it helped that due to an error in submitting the copyright it ended up in the public domain. Hey, that helped make it a cult classic, and Romero a horror movie icon.

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Fury Road is perhaps the antithesis of Night of the Living Dead. The latter is low-budget and simple. The former is one of the most bananas movies ever made, in a good way?

George Miller got his start with Mad Max, about a world barely clinging to civilization. By the events of Fury Road, most remnants of our world are long gone, save for a few salvaged weapons and vehicles. The result is perhaps the most-thrilling action extravaganza…ever?

Sure, there is some silliness to Miller’s Mad Max world, with some truly dark dystopian elements undercut by names like “Doof Warrior.” There’s nothing silly about the action, though. Relying largely on practical effects, Fury Road has to be seen to be believed. The car chases, the action, it’s all so riveting. By the way, not only was Fury Road a hit, but it won six Oscars.

Planet of the Apes (1968)

Planet of the Apes was not the first movie to have a twist ending. It certainly was not the last. But almost none have nailed it like Planet of the Apes. The film's final shot reveals why is belongs on this list.

Until that moment, you think Charlton Heston’s astronaut, George Taylor, has traveled through time and space to a planet where apelike creatures have advanced to human levels of intellect.

Then, well, it turns our the truth is much worse.

Liked This List of the 13 Best Post-Apocalyptic Movies We've Ever Seen?

You might also like this list of Gen X Film Stars Gone Too Soon or this list of A.I. Movie Villains Ranked.

Main image: A promotional image for Planet of the Apes. 20th Century Fox.

But First

What made Lost so successful? It became a beloved water-cooler show during its first season in 2004 due to its highly complex storyline and interwoven characters. It's easy to spend hours debating the meaning of various easter eggs, and the show is chock full of head-scratching riddles like, "What lies in the shadow of the statue?"

Created by J. J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof, and Jeffrey Lieber, Lost is known for its fluid timeline, with flashbacks and flash-fowards that explain how characters' backstories are interconnected. Its huge ensemble cast featured Matthew Fox, Evangeline Lilly, Jorge Garcia, Josh Holloway, Terry O'Quinn, Daniel Dae Kim, Yunjin Kim, Naveen Andrews, Emilie de Ravin, Harold Perrineau, Dominic Monaghan, Ian Somerhalder, Maggie Grace, Henry Ian Cusick, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, and Michael Emerson.

Though the plot became more convoluted as the seasons went on — and many have criticized the series finale — Lost expertly weaves supernatural and science fiction elements in with its compelling commentary on human nature.

Here are the 12 best Lost episodes, starting with the twelfth best and building to the best. We'll consider two-parter episodes as one episode for these purposes.

Number 12: 'Ab Aeterno' (Season 6, Episode 8)

After seeing so much of Richard throughout the series, we finally got an explanation for why he never ages in Season 6, and it's quite satisfying. We love it when Lost transports us to another world.

With a flashback to the 1800s, we learn that Richard is really Ricardo, a poor working man from the Canary Islands who is jailed after killing a man who refused to give him the medicine he needed to save his dying wife. He ends up aboard the Black Rock, which crashes on the island. There, he meets the Man in Black and becomes immortal, which is why he hasn't seemed to age a day, nearly 200 years later.

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Number 11: 'What Kate Did' (Season 2, Episode 9)

Kate's backstory episode finally explains what she did to end up in handcuffs being escorted by a U.S. Marshall on Oceanic 815. It's so dramatic that it's burned in our minds (sorry, sorry).

Spoiler alert: She killed her father, Wayne, who was abusing her mother. How did she do it? By blowing up his house while he was sleeping. The kicker is that her mom is the one who turns her in.

It's also one of many times we hear Patsy Cline during Kate's scenes, specifically "Walkin' After Midnight."

Number 10: 'Across the Sea' (Season 6, Episode 15)

Though Season 6 as a whole left a lot to be desired, this episode finally gave us the answers we spent years waiting for regarding the origins of good and evil on the island — Jacob and his brother, the Man in Black.

We learn how the two brothers ended up on the island back in ancient times, and that their adopted mother drove a wedge between them. It also explains the well of light that serves as the source of electromagnetism on the Island.

Part of what makes this episode so satisfying is that the show had been building up to it since Locke and Walt played a very metaphorical game of backgammon early on in Season 1. It was also foreshadowed by the discovery of a skeleton in the cave in that first season, which was buried with a little bag holding two stones: one black and one white.

Number 9: 'La Fleur' (Season 5, Episode 13)

Season 5 gave us a delicious deep dive into the history of the Dharma Initiative, one of the coolest and most compelling elements of the show. This episode walks us through how Sawyer, Juliet, Jin and Miles ended up living in the barracks during the 1970s. Because, y'know, time travel. If you're a Lostie, you're already desensitized to a certain level of suspended disbelief.

Watching the next episode, "Namaste," gives a fuller, more colorful picture of life on the Dharma compound, but this episode really set things in motion and gave us a much more humanized view of the Dharma folks than we'd had previously. It also set up the epic love story between Sawyer and Juliet.

Also Read: 12 Shameless '80s Comedies That Don't Care If You're Offended

Number 8: 'Orientation' (Season 2, Episode 3)

We just can't get enough of the Dharma Initiative. This episode was pretty much our first introduction to it, with Locke watching the orientation reels inside the hatch that explained the button experiment.

But of course, in classic Lost fashion, some essential information was missing from the film.

The whole button-pressing stuff is endlessly fascinating and psychologically interesting. Is the button real? Is it a just an experiment to see how much people will do if they're told by some authority figure? Perhaps it's a little bit of both.

Number 7: 'Man of Science, Man of Faith' (Season 2, Episode 1).

Excusing Jack's very unconvincing wig (see above), this episode is a really great Jack flashback. It explained a lot of his neuroses around fixing people, specifically in the case of his future ex-wife, who he met during spinal surgery — so romantic.

It's also when we met Desmond for the first time, getting the backstory of how he lived in the hatch pressing the button for years. There's an unforgettable needle-drop moment when Desmond plays "Make Your Own Kind of Music" by Cass Elliott. Plus, when its revealed that Jack and Desmond met once, pre-Island, we heard Desmond's famous line for the first time: "See you in another life."

Number 6: 'Walkabout' (Season 1, Episode 3)

This is the episode that first gave us a glimpse into the multi-layered backstory of one of the show's strongest and most important characters: John Locke. Here, we learned what Locke was up to before the Island — that he was paralyzed in a wheelchair, and that he had been turned away for that reason from a walkabout in Australia.

It's also the first time we heard the iconic line: "Don't tell me what I can't do!"

Also Read: 13 Very Profitable Movies That Made 100 Times Their Budget at the Box Office

Number 5: 'The 23rd Psalm' (Season 2, Episode 10)

This episode gave us not only Mr. Eko's backstory, but an explanation as to how the small plane that Boone and Locke found in the jungle ended up on the island.

Leave it to Lost to provide an entire, complete character arc for Eko's brother, Yemi the priest, in a single episode through one heart-wrenching flashback — and then to wrap it up with a devastating bow as we watched Eko lay Yemi's body to rest.

Number 4: 'Exodus' (Season 1, Episodes 23, 24 and 25)

One of the most jarring scenes in the series is in the three-parter Season 1 finale. Believing for one brief, shining moment that they've been saved, we watched the smiles melt away from Michael, Jin, Sawyer, and Walt's faces as they realize they've been captured by the Others.

It's a powerful finale to one of the most iconic first seasons in television history.

Number 3: 'Through the Looking Glass' (Season 3, Episodes 22 and 23)

This two-part episode, the Season 3 finale, was another heavy hitter.

Killing off one of the most beloved characters of the first three seasons — Drive Shaft bassist Charlie of "You All Everybody" fame — was one of the saddest and most dramatic deaths on the show. In his final moments, he gave Desmond a warning: "Not Penny's boat."

But what really set this episode over the edge was that it left us with that shocking final scene explaining that what we previous assumed were flashbacks of a bearded, alcoholic, Jeep-driving Jack were actually flash forwards — to after a successfully escape from the Island. He famously pleaded with Kate to return to the Island, giving us one of the show's most iconic lines: "We have to go back!"

Number 2: 'Numbers' (Season 1, Episode 18)

4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42. This episode is what hooked many fans on Lost back in Season 1. It's one of the show's most compelling riddles. The show never fully explains the meaning behind the numbers, other than that they corresponded to each of Jacob's potential "candidates" to inherit the Island.

In this episode, we learned that the reason Hurley was in Australia was because he was looking for the origin of the numbers. After using them to win the lottery, he came to believe that they were cursed, and that he's the reason that Ocean flight 815 crashed on the Island.

Number 1: 'The Constant' (Season 4, Episode 5)

If this episode didn't make you cry, I don't know what will. The love story between Desmond and Penny was one of the purest and most powerful of the entire series.

It was also a great showcase of Lost's fascinating approach to time. When Desmond and other characters came "unstuck" in time as a result of the island's strange electromagnetic properties, he had to find his "constant" — a person who exists in both his past and present timelines — or die.

Lucky for him, he got ahold of his long-lost love, Penelope Widmore. In a show that poses a lot more questions than answers, this episode offered at least a little very welcome resolution.

Honorable mentions: The Man Behind the Curtain (Season 3, Episode 20), Solitary (Season 1, Episode 8), Exposé (Season 3, Episode 14)

Liked This List of the 12 Best Lost Episodes?

Let us know in the comments if you agree or disagree.

You might also like these: 12 Best Seinfeld Episodes or these: 12 Behind the Scenes Stories From Blazing Saddles.

Main Image: A promotional image of Evangeline Lilly in Lost. ABC

The festival, a regular presence on MovieMaker's annual list of 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee, runs through Sunday and features a stellar lineup of films. The events include a discussion between Ari Aster, who is receiving this year's Filmmaker on the Edge award, and John Waters — the festival's patron saint. Murray Bartlett, who lives near Provincetown, will receive this year's Excellence in Acting award, and speak with indie film icon Christine Vachon.

The festival draws lively, discerning crowds, and leans into the area's history as both an arts mecca and a longtime getaway and sanctuary for the LGBTQ+ community. This year's opening film is Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror, the 1975 cult classic that has become a queer touchstone. Other highlights include the Sundance hits Twinless, from attendee James Sweeney, and Ponyboi, from River Gallo, recipient of the Next Wave Award. Bartlett is in the Ponyboi cast, as is festival attendee Dylan O'Brien, who also stars alongside Sweeney in the excellent Twinless.

The festival is also known for lively fundraisers: In the past, Waters has hosted events at the town dump and town jail, but this year it will focus on high school with a Footloose-inspired Prom party on Saturday night.

Provincetown International Film Festival executive director Anne Hubbell understands the astonishing attraction of PIFF — because she started out as an attendee. Hubbell, a New Yorker, began attending years ago in her capacity as an executive for Kodak, and found herself returning year after year.

"I made a lot of friends, because everybody's always so warm and lovely here, and we stayed in touch," Hubbell told MovieMaker. "And then during the pandemic, I came to stay here for a little while, and a friend who was on the board of the Provincetown Film Society said, 'Hey, you should come do this.' And I was like, 'Well, OK, let's talk about it.' And then, you know — it's hard to say no to Provincetown."

That friend was Gabby Hanna, president of the board of directors of the Provincetown Film Society, which runs the festival.

The town's allure matches that of the festival. It's known for pristine beaches and vibrant, sometimes otherworldly light — visitors rhapsodize about the lavender skies.

"I mean, the light is magical," notes Hubbell. "You can't really even describe it, which is why painters and photographers and filmmakers want to be here. And the town is really welcoming. Filmmakers come in and fall in love with it."

The Provincetown International Film Festival and the Attraction of Provincetown

Walk down the eminently walkable main drag and you'll see the Stars and Stripes flapping in the wind alongside Pride flags. Street musicians sing out. T-shirts in the shop windows spin double entendres about Dunkin Donuts and pilgrims. And you'll be hard pressed keep track of whether there are more signs for lobster rolls or ice cream. (Try the brown butter brownie at the Nut House.)

Speaking of drag, it abounds — on Wednesday afternoon a queen dressed as Cher from Clueless invited tourists to a '90s theme night. And Provincetown is one of the only places in the world where you can find yourself steeped in both delicious camp and high culture, while choosing between fine dining and lobster rolls or pizza. PIFF's closing night film, Spiritus: No Business Like Dough Business, tells the story of one of (at least two) local restaurants where a young Anthony Bourdain learned his art.

At a time when many festivals struggle to fill seats, the PIFF builds up the local film community by supporting it year round. Local theater the Waters Edge Cinema (upstairs from that ice cream we mentioned) plays new releases, arthouse films and revival screenings year round, even during the long winters when the streets clear. The theater also hosts meetings of the Outer Cape Filmmakers, local moviemakers who discuss the status of their projects.

"We want people to understand that the festival is only five days out of the year. The other 360 we're here working with local filmmakers," says Hubbell.

That work includes collaborating with local groups like the Center for Coastal Studies, which is devoted to protecting marine ecosystems.

The festival also stands out for its short film programming. PIFF Shorts programmer Valérie Déus leads the selection of eight shorts programs — including slates focused on documentary, animation, and local filmmakers. PIFF is Oscar-qualifying in three categories — Best Documentary Short Film, Best Narrative Short Film, and Best Queer Short Film — which makes it especially appealing to short filmmakers.

"One of the things that's great about having that many shorts is our the patrons that have been coming for a long time really like those programs — they sell out here," says Hubbelll. "And we're catching people who are generally at the beginning of their careers. So we're like, 'Great, come and see Provincetown — come and be part of what we're doing."

You can learn more about the Provincetown International Film Festival, including buying tickets, here.

Main image: Ponyboi, one of this year's films at the Provincetown International Film Festival.

Through our script and film competitions, and renowned Writers Conference, AFF curates a community full of fresh perspectives and relentless hustle that promise exciting careers to follow. With this list, we are thrilled to showcase these incredibly talented voices, celebrate their commitment to the craft, and watch their careers flourish in the months and years to come.

Austin Kolodney

Writer Dead Man's Wire; writer/director Two Chairs, Not One

Kolodney is a writer and director who has worked with Funny Or Die, Almost Friday TV, and Comedy Central. Most recently, his feature script, Dead Man's Wire, wrapped filming with Gus Van Sant directing, and starring Bill Skarsgard, Dacre Montgomery, Colman Domingo, Myha'la, Cary Elwes, and Al Pacino.

Tell us about a highlight in your career.

I was recently on set with Al Pacino for Dead Man’s Wire. One of the first things he said to me was "Oh you got it, kid. Great words, man. You know it when you read it...and you got it.". So right then I could have passed away peaceful and happy.

Michael Vlamis & Kyle Anderson

Co-writers Crossword (Vlamis directed), Music Theories, Blue Slide Park

Vlamis and Anderson are good, Midwest boys who met and began working together after exchanging digital series that weren't awful. They are the co-writers of the soon-to-be-released feature psychological thriller, Crossword, which Vlamis also directed, produced, and acted in. They also have a comedic series, Music Theories, set up at Sony with Dan Lagana showrunning, and they're actively working on several new projects ranging from comedy to horror.

How did AFF facilitate your journey?

AFF not only gave us a launch pad to begin our sales process, it allowed us to see how hundreds of people we don't know received our film, which was an invaluable experience. Also, many of the writers, filmmakers, and just all the people in general who we met at the festival were beyond supportive and interested in helping one another. We made a bunch of new friends who we hope will one day become collaborators.

Hannah Mescon & Dreux Moreland

Co-writers Warhol, Blown, The Golden Door

Mescon and Moreland recently completed the story of the 1980s Cotton Club murder, Blown for Artists Equity, with Addictive Pictures producing. They are also developing a project alongside Tea Time Pictures. and completed Warhol for TriStar, Pascal and Paradox. They also sold their Austin Film Festival Finalist feminist thriller script, The Golden Door to Lauren Sanchez and Matt Goldberg.

What has been your biggest lesson in navigating the industry?

Don’t be precious. This can apply on a micro level— something like a line of dialogue or a scene. But also, don’t be precious about projects. Things will die and change and sometimes they will come back to life years later. Easier said than done, but try not to let your ego get attached. Also, contracts can take up to a year to pay out, so plan accordingly.

Susie Yankou

Director/writer Sisters

Yankou is a Toronto-born, LA-based writer/director/producer specializing in queer, comedic stories that balance her irreverent, referential humor with an undeniable sense of heart.  Her debut feature, Sisters is slated for release in Fall 2025. She is a graduate of USC’s Writing for Screen and Television program. 

What’s next?

A new feature called Here for the Right Reasons! It's basically the queer, hard comedy version of Miss Congeniality. Coming off the heels of Sisters, I'm so inspired to keep making films, but I want to scale up a bit and making a big (but still edgy) comedy feels like the natural next step. I'm also producing the feature A Magical Place Called Glendale under Ed Helm’s banner Pacific Electric Picture Company!

Maia Henkin

Writer Suits LA

Henkin is an award-winning genre writer and filmmaker who is a member of the WGA. She was in the 2024 NBCU Writer’s Lab and WGAE’s New York Stage and Film Workshop (NYSAF).

What’s new?

Post Austin Film Festival, I got repped at Untitled Entertainment, joined the WGA, landed my first staffing job, and wrote my first episode of Suits LA! I also wrote a new spec and a new feature that I will be going out with in the Spring.

HF Crum 

Writer Dune: Prophecy, 3 Faces of Hunger & Thirst, Molotovs, Sawbones

Roger Corman recruited Crum out of USC film school to direct low-budget wonders around the world. As a stay-at-home dad, Crum writes everyman Hitchcockian thrillers between flipping pancakes and mending hearts/knees.  He is a Film Independent Screenwriting Fellow and recently signed with managers Ryan Cunningham and Jake Dillman at Anonymous Content.

What do you consider your big break?

Screenwriting contests. After film school, I worked as a low budget feature director, but ultimately winning screenwriting contests like the Austin Film Festival, Bluecat, Slamdance, and Roadmap Writers JumpStart are what put me on the map.

Austin Elliott

Co-writer American Horror Stories

Elliott currently works on the live-action Spider-Man show Spider-Noir as a script coordinator. Previously, he was a writer's assistant and script coordinator for both American Horror Story and its episodic anthology spinoff, American Horror Stories (of which he recently co-wrote his first episode).

What are you working on currently?

I actually have the AFF community to thank for my current script coordinator gig on Spider-Noir. My reps submitted me for the position and the showrunner, Oren Uziel, happened to be an AFF alum. He remembered previously meeting me at the festival, which really helped.

Josh Flanagan 

Director/producer Pickleheads; head writer Elkhorn, How Are We Today?

Raised across Texas and schooled at its titular university, Josh rode the rise of digital media as a lead creative at Austin-based Rooster Teeth Productions. He just wrapped production on his feature directorial debut, Pickleheads. A combat veteran of the Iraq war, Josh is privileged to serve as a mentor for the Writer’s Guild Foundation’s Veterans Writing Project. 

What’s next for you?

Too many things. I’m in post-production on Pickleheads., finishing two wildly different horror features (one for my directing pile), starting story discussions on a second season of a PBS mental health show, How Are We Today? and trying to find any moment to do a third (hopefully final) draft of a pilot that has some amazing producers attached so it can actually hit the market.

Laura Hunter Drago

Writer The Crime at Camp Ashwood; producer the New Girl, The Echo

Raised in small-town Virginia, Drago was a shy child who found her voice through storytelling. An alumna of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Drago writes fantasies and thrillers that center women. She won the Austin Film Festival Fiction Podcast Award for her series, The Crime at Camp Ashwood,.

What’s next for you?

I'm currently a Film Independent Project Involve Writing Fellow, so I'm working on writing a short film within that program. Outside of that, I just finished a TV pilot version of my podcast The Crime at Camp Ashwood, and I'm working on a couple of feature ideas for later this year.

Meko Winbush

Director Gray Matter, In The Darkness

Winbush is an L.A-based filmmaker. She is a graduate of Occidental College. After college she fell into editing movie trailers. A desire to be creative outside of the trailer industry led her to write, direct, and edit several short films. In 2023, she won HBO’s filmmaker competition show, Project Greenlight headlined and executive produced by Issa Rae.

How did you get your start in the industry?

I was always interested in writing, but began to take it seriously after college while interning at Gary Ross' production company. From that point on, if I wasn't working, I was likely writing. 

Connor Martin 

Writer/director Nonno, The Dregs

Martin writes and directs international stories about people behaving badly and paying the ultimate price. He is an alumnus of the 2024 Black List and Stowe's 2024 Producers' Lab. He has several projects in development with some fantastic partners, but is most excited about his directorial debut, The Dregs, which will be shooting this Summer.

What are you looking forward to?

The movie I'm directing has some incredible creative partners who share a love of independent film. So that's number one. Number two is getting to write a biopic of a childhood hero - with a studio I never thought I'd get to work with.

 Jen Howell

Writer Lopez vs Lopez, The Great Indoors, Baby Daddy

Howell got her industry start as the sequester manager on Hell's Kitchen, living in a beach house with losing contestants, and eventually becoming a story producer there. She then transitioned into scripted. She has written sitcom episodes on Freeform, CBS, and NBC for the likes of Bowen & Sons, Julie Bowen’s production company.

What was the turning point in your career/project? 

A Modern Family producer who'd been following my blog (100 Dates) contacted me. She was forming a company with Julie Bowen and looking for female content. Two days after that, they signed on to produce my show. I assumed we’d go to series and make a million bucks! That's not how it panned out, but it was a breakthrough, marking a very clear 'before' and 'after' in my career.

Daniel Negret

Writer/producer Shaman

Negret is an award-winning Colombian writer, producer, director based out of London. His feature writing debut, Shaman, premiered at the Austin Film Festival in 2024 and was a Jury Nominee. Other writing credits include the upcoming survival thriller Asphyxia, produced by Capstone Studios, Sombra, a canine thriller with Pierre Morel executive producing;,and the award-winning animation Pineapple Calamari

What’s next for you?

I’m excited to share that Well Go will be releasing Shaman later this year! 

Sam & David Cutler-Kreutz

Writers/directors "Trapped," "A Lien," "Flounder"

Cutler-Kreutz are an award-winning writing, directing and producing team based in NYC and LA. As brothers, they grew up making films together.  Their first short film "Flounder" premiered in the Clermont-Ferrand International Competition 2022. Their second film "A Lien" was nominated for the 97th Academy Awards. Their third short "Trapped" premiered at SXSW 2024 Narrative Shorts Competition, where it won the Special Jury Prize.

What writing challenges have you encountered?

One of the toughest scenes we ever did was writing out the interview in our first draft of the A Lien script. It was a super long and complicated scene that had to cover a ton of ground in not much time. In the end out solution was just to cut it, the audience is way smarter than you think and sometimes the best thing to do is just cut stuff that really doesn't move the story forward.

Lindsey Robertson

Writer/producer Party People

Robertson has been making up stories since she was six years old – back then, it was called "lying," but now it's called "screenwriting." She originally hails from Dripping Springs, Texas, and she received a BA in Theatre Studies from the University of Texas at Austin before going on to earn her Screenwriting MFA from the University of Southern California. Her first feature, Party People premiered at the 2024 Austin Film Festival. She is currently set to co-direct the horror comedy, I Was a Teenage Monster, which is in pre-production. 

What drives your love for filmmaking?

AFF really drove home the fact that Austin has a motivated, creative community of filmmakers who are eager to support one another. I know I'm incredibly biased, but that's why I want to continue to film things in and around Austin. People here are just excited by the idea of being scrappy and making something together. 

Zach Cannon

Writer Panhandle, FBI: Most Wanted, Resident Alien

Cannon was raised in a multiethnic household in Miami, where his mother’s family are Cuban exiles and his father is a retired police chief.  He was most recently an executive story editor on CBS’s FBI: Most Wanted. He has sold and developed pilots with Amazon and Lionsgate. He is an alumnus of USC’s Writing for Screen & Television program, the National Hispanic Media Coalition’s Series Scriptwriters Program, and NBC’s Writers on the Verge. 

What was the turning point in your career/project?

Someone once told me that a career path is hindsight, which is to say there’s no one thing that gave me my break. Instead, it was a culmination of years building my career through parallel paths.

Elise Salomon

Producer Inside, Caoineadh, Urd, Skuld

Salomon is a Los Angeles-based filmmaker. She writes present-day, grounded folk horror with an all-encompassing aesthetic, rooted in drama and true to its supernatural underpinnings. Her projects have been featured in festivals, competitions and fellowships such as Sundance, Stowe Story Labs, SXSW, FrightFest, Fantasia, Frontieres and Marche du Film at Cannes. 

What was the turning point in your career/project?

Being accepted into competition with Caoineadh at AFF in 2023. The screenplay was one of three horror finalists, and it was the first time I had ever been recognized as a writer by a festival. It was a huge honor and so many doors opened for me.

 William Phoenix

Writer/director "Sunny Side Up": producer Learning English, We’re Here, and Home

Phoenix is a writer, director, and producer from North Hollywood, California.  His short film, "Sunny Side Up," was an Austin Film Festival official selection and won Best Short at New York Film Week. As a producer, his credits include Learning English (official selection at SXSW and Tribeca), HBO’s We're Here (season one), and the Apple TV+ Emmy-winning series Home (season two). 

What are you working on currently?

Writing a lot! I'm currently in post-production on two projects; a scripted feature I directed last Summer called The Bee and a sports doc-series I produced with Netflix. I'm also fine-tuning my feature writing debut Silver Spring.

 Mike Carreon

Writer Lopez vs Lopez, 2025 Disney Entertainment Television Writing Program

Carreon is a Tejano comedy writer who uses heart and humor to transform the hate in our world into stories audiences love. He s currently in the 2025 Disney Entertainment Television (DET) Writing Program. Previously, he co-starred in and co-wrote multiple episodes of NBCUniversal’s Lopez vs Lopez.

What do you consider your big break?

Growing up dirt poor on a goat ranch in a tiny Texas town, I didn’t think a career in this industry was possible for me, until I learned about improv comedy. For the next few years, I drove round trips from San Antonio to Austin five days a week to perform. I raised the funds to adapt my award-winning improv show into a short film that premiered at Tribeca and at the Austin Film Festival, where I met my first manager bar hopping across Congress Ave. These breadcrumbs of success along with supportive friends and family gave me the confidence to move to Los Angeles.

Mason Greer 

Director "Lineage," My Name Is Vendetta, "Shout"

Greer is an award-winning writer and director, recently honored with the Big Indie Pictures Fellowship Award at the Austin Film Festival. His work spans commercials, promo films, short films, animation, and dubbing for Netflix productions, with multiple awards and official selections at festivals across the U.S. and Canada.

What do you consider your big break?

After becoming a finalist in the Warner Bros/Blklst Incubator Challenge, it gave me enough recognition to get a meeting to option one of my spec scripts titled Less Than Grand Larceny. Although the rights inevitably went back to me the following year, this was a great start for me and gave me real motivation to keep working.

Michail Eggelhoefer

Writer Hung Over

Eggelhoefer is a British-Malaysian screenwriter currently based in London (though he’s lived in seven different countries so far). He tends to write stories about the relationships people have during, and after, their most difficult moments. His work often draws on his own experiences dealing with trauma, addiction, racism, and the search damaged people have for connection. 

What was the turning point in your career/project? 

A major turning point was when a very kind showrunner took the time to read one of my scripts. I expected him to rip it to shreds, but he was very complimentary. It was probably the first time that I’d had a working screenwriter tell me my work was at a professional standard. It was a much-needed boost during I time when I didn’t have much confidence, and helped me realize how far I’d come. 

Imogen Grace

Writer Audrey

Grace is a Montreal-based screenwriter and a graduate of the Canadian Film Centre TV Writing Program. Her feature screenplay Audrey won the Best Feature Sci-Fi Award at Austin Film Festival and in the Script Pipeline Screenplay Competition. She is currently developing multiple projects for film and television, delving into themes like the cost of ambition, messy healing journeys, the fine line between good and bad, and the universal search for belonging.

What was the turning point in your career/project?

Being accepted into the Canadian Film Centre Bell Media Prime Time TV Writing program. I got to take part in a full-time writers room with the incredibly smart and generous writer/showrunner Bruce Smith, write my own series, and pitch to many of the major players in Canada. It was rigorous and intense, in the best way. It changed the course of my career for sure. And, of course, the Austin Film Festival.

Emily Everhard

Writer/director "Special Delivery"; creator/writer Tektite

Everhard is a queer filmmaker who tells stories about female underdogs and outsiders. She was a 2024 Sundance Fellow and Enderby Entertainment Filmmaking Fellow. Her films have played and won awards at festivals including Aspen, Palm Springs, Austin, SeriesFest, HollyShorts, Nashville, BendFilm and more.

What was the turning point in your career/project?

2024 was a huge year for me. I kicked off the year with a Sundance-Sloan Episodic Fellowship for my teleplay Tektite and ended the year at AFF with two big wins as a writer-director for my short film, "Special Delivery." I also graduated from Columbia and got representation.

Shruti Parekh

Writer/director/producer "Zari"

Parekh is an Atlanta-bred, Brooklyn-based filmmaker who tells stories of self-discovery and subversion.  Her most recent narrative short, "Zari," was produced as a winner of the CAPE/Janet Yang Productions Julia S. Gouw Short Film Challenge, won the Grand Jury and Audience Awards at NewFest, and was nominated for Best Narrative Short at Austin Film Festival. She has a BA from Brown University and an MFA in Directing from UCLA.

What’s next?

I have been taking my short film "Zari" to more festivals and finishing post-production on my next short, "Homebody." Once that’s done, I plan to shift my focus back to writing.

Ama Anane

Writer/director Cottonmouth 

The product of Jamaican and Ghanaian parents, Anane grew up in two of the wildest places on earth: Papua New Guinea and Las Vegas. Her scripts and standup explore the identities that divide and make us whole. She was a 2024 Moonshot TV Pilot Accelerator Fellow, a 2024 Script Competition Finalist for the Austin Film Festival, a 2024 Semifinalist for the Humanitas New Voices Fellowship, and currently a part of the 2025-2027 NBCUniversal Launch TV Writer's Program. She’s directing her first short film, “Cottonmouth,” in 2025.  She is a graduate of Emerson College and Columbia University.

What was a turning point in your writing career?

I think it's still turning, but being a script finalist for the Austin Film Festival was huge for me! And before that, I got into the Moonshot TV Pilot Accelerator, which helped me hone my pitching skills with a cadre of peer women and nonbinary writers and put me in the room (well, Zoom) with network and streaming executives to share my pitch.

SNL celebrated its landmark 50th season with SNL50: The Homecoming Concert at Radio City Music Hall on Valentine’s Day and the three-hour SNL50: Anniversary Special two days later. They marked an astounding achievement for the sketch-comedy TV series, which operates within its own singular, crazy space in 30 Rock’s Studio 8H — and in entertainment history. 

Another Lorneism is that costumes, hair, sets, camera angles and other details should never be the joke of a sketch — they should play it straight, in contrast to the funny performances. Which means the SNL behind-the-scenes team has to be exacting and detail-oriented, with far less time than they would have on a typical film set.

MovieMaker spoke with several of the show’s key operatives, the below-the-line personnel who get the show to air, week after week, and deserve their own celebratory moment.

Louie Zakarian, SNL Makeup Department Head

Louie Zakarian was at SNL during TV’s standard-definition era, and boy was his job easier before HD.

“I remember early on we did a test where they shot the show in regular and then HD. And then the following week, all the department heads sat around the studio and they showed us the regular version, and then they showed us the HD version, and you could see everything,” Zakarian says. 

“On a bald cap that looked beautiful on standard, [on HD] you saw the edges. If blush wasn’t properly applied… you could see the smears. You could read the label on a bottle — it was very scary.”

There have been other major technology changes since Zakarian started at SNL in 1995, not all of which have made his job harder. For example, these days, Zakarian does a 3D scan of the show’s host on a Tuesday and prints it the following day, “in case there’s something written at the table on Wednesday night that needs a prosthetic, a severed head, or something crazy.”

Zakarian has a room at his shop filled with these heads.

“My kids used to say, ‘Daddy makes monsters,’” Zakarian says.

Daddy also makes great bald caps. He recalls, for example, creating the perfect one to hide the long, thick hair of longtime cast member Kate McKinnon.

“We came up with a way to wrap her hair underneath; it was a whole process. Basically, we’d wrap her hair and put a stocking cap on, but then there would be a little piece of string attached to the front of the stocking cap that would run out the back,” Zakarian explains. “So, I would apply the bald cap three-quarters of the way, leaving the nape exposed, and then slowly slide out that stocking cap so you wouldn’t have any ridges. And then I would be able to mush her hair around to make it nice and flat underneath the bald cap. Sometimes, if they have a lot of hair, they’ll look like an alien, or they’ll look kind of crazy, but we were able to get away with it.”

Bald caps typically take about 15 or 20 minutes to apply, Zakarian said, with some notable exceptions. He was able to do Will Ferrell and Fred Armisen in six minutes apiece — but his record is just four-and-a-half minutes on current cast member Mikey Day.

Turning James Austin Johnson into Donald Trump is a bit trickier than that — and much harder than the Alec Baldwin-as-Trump SNL days. Zakarian and Johnson are on their sixth Trump look, he says. 

“Every time either Trump loses weight, or James loses a little weight, I’ll redo it,” Zakarian says. 

The current Trump look involves a fake belly and chest piece.

“I think this is the happiest I’ve been with his Trump look,” Zakarian explains. “It looks like him and gives him the most weight.”

Liz Patrick, SNL Director

Liz Patrick started her career at MTV, where she “was exposed to a lot of live television,” including TRL, awards shows, red carpet events, and a big New Year’s Eve special. So when she joined Saturday Night Live, she notes, she “wasn’t scared” of the Live part. 

She also worked at Ellen, which has a bit of a reputation for stress. 

Though her 90 minutes each weekend in the SNL control room can be “pretty intense,” Patrick says she gets a little “time to breathe” during a show’s two musical performances. She earns the respite.

Patrick spends Monday and Tuesday with the musical guests, primarily. By 10 a.m. on Wednesday morning, Patrick is reading through the earliest-available version of each pitched sketch. 

It’s important that she gets a jump on understanding which potential scenes will need “a staircase, a front door, a breakaway window,” and perhaps even a choreographer or a stuntperson.

This won’t be the last time she sits with the material.

“The script will change so many times, and sometimes it’s just trying to stay up to date with those changes. Because obviously it affects blocking…  sometimes adding people to the sketch, losing people from the sketch, and sometimes you don’t have the chance to go back and look at it,” Patrick says. 

“So, you may have rehearsed it on Thursday and Friday, and then by Saturday morning, before you rehearse it in the morning, before dress rehearsal, it’s already changed again.”

And that’s Patrick describing the chill part of her Saturdays. Between dress and air is “the most adrenaline-fueled time in my life,” she explains.

Also Read: FYCit Wants to Help You Keep Track of Award Season Events

For SNL50, Patrick had an extra obstacle to overcome — a very literal obstacle. As it did with the 40th anniversary special, NBC brought extra seating into the smaller-than-you’d-expect Studio 8H. 

But SNL50 was a much more ambitious show. With the temporary bleachers and so many more live sketches this time around — some of them on large sets — Patrick said there was less floor space than ever before. That makes it tricky when you need to put cameras… somewhere.

“Generally, this show is shot on pedestal cameras, but [for SNL50] I would have a handheld camera built up to operate like a ped,” Patrick says. “It takes up a smaller footprint, so here we are, backed up right against the bleachers. I can’t use a giant ped because now I’m [encroaching] by three or four feet. But if I use this handheld on sticks, now I’ve given back two feet.”

Leo Yoshimura, N. Joseph (Joe) DeTullio, and Keith Raywood, SNL Production Designers

If you think it’s hard finding space for pedestal cameras, talk to SNL production designers Leo Yoshimura, Joe DeTullio, and Keith Raywood. They’re the guys who needed to fit the many SNL50 sets in a studio originally built to house radio shows.

Sets for Saturday Night Live are built in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, trucked to 30 Rock, and crammed into elevators that were most certainly not designed for this sort of thing.

Leo Yoshimura

Yoshimura describes the regular design schedule as “chaotic and hectic,” yet “exhilarating” come Saturday nights at 11:30 p.m. ET. And for Yoshimura, we do mean 11:30 on the dot. He handles the cold open — which is the first performance viewers see, but is generally the last script to be chosen, given the show’s never-ending effort to be as topical as possible.

“I usually start my cold open search on 11:30 a.m. on Friday morning,” Yoshimura says. 

His search goes like this: First he finds a writer, a process he likens to searching through a Where’s Waldo book. He and the writer will then talk, and Yoshimura will seek a “one-sentence” (at most) description setting the scene, i.e. “Presidential Debate,” “State of the Union,” or “The Oval Office.” 

By 1:30 p.m. he’s doing photo research; an hour later he’s drawing designs.

At 4 p.m. Yoshimura faxes (“I’m old school,” he says) his set designs to the shop across the bridge. And a mere hour after that, he’s building in Brooklyn. Yoshimura, and the new set, are due back at Rockefeller Center by around 9 or 10 p.m.

It all takes a crazy amount of energy, but at least he’s not alone.

Joe DeTullio

Joe DeTullio has been with the show for more than 30 years, and before that, served as an NBC page. He outlined three distinct differences he’s seen at “SNL” across the decades. 

First up: “The Evolution of the Music Guest.”

“Originally, the guest musicians would come and perform within the existing stage with the existing scenery,” DeTullio recalls. Today, the musicians are “welcome to create and bring whatever environment they wish,” so long as it is “within the limitations of our space and within the capacity of our crews.”

That means more production work, as the scenery may change from Song 1 to Song 2. Moving all this stuff around, as well as the components of the live sketches, makes for a Saturday night “game of Tetris,” DeTullio says.

The second change: “The Advancement of Technology.” 

The best example here is the video wall, which DeTullio says is “more readily available, more reasonably priced to rent, and is becoming more commonly used.” A video wall is “effective” but also a “large permanent fixture” that must be factored in for that weekly Tetris game.

The third development: “The Film Unit.” Actually, make that units. These days, they’re large, and numerous, DeTullio says.

Pre-taped segments are great, but their evolution has created challenges, he explains. In earlier days of SNL, the pre-tapes were done on dark weeks and rarely involved the episode’s rotating hosts. 

These days, pre-tapings whisk cast members away from Thursday and/or Friday rehearsals. 

Keith Raywood

Keith Raywood, meanwhile, is the unsung hero of the Radio City concert special. In some ways, the Valentine’s Day performance felt like his destiny.

Like Liz Patrick, Raywood did a lot of work for MTV earlier in his career. His first VMAs in 1994 were at Radio City Music Hall, so when Michaels chose the iconic venue over the equally iconic Madison Square Garden, Raywood was elated. It was also Michaels who hand-selected Raywood to oversee the event, which was two years in the works, from a design standpoint. 

“I love that it was called ‘The Homecoming,’ because it almost was like a homecoming for me,” Raywood says. 

“Those two paths of my career got to meet,” he adds. “For me personally, it was a very special show.”

Even though Radio City Music Hall has one of the largest stages in the country, Raywood wanted more. For SNL50: The Homecoming Concert, Raywood pulled out 1,500 seats, built two side stages and a runway connecting them, and “dropped the orchestra pit to become a mosh pit,” he says.

With Eddie Vedder, Jack White, and a reunion of the surviving members of Nirvana on the Peacock special’s docket, the mosh pit was a must. Raywood’s design also included giant industrial fans projected via video screens, recalling the background of Nirvana’s 1992 debut perfomance on the show. 

Dave Grohl, the Nirvana drummer-turned Foo Fighters frontman, “really appreciated” the digital re-creation,” Raywood says. “He told me it was really cool.”

Jodi Mancuso, SNL Hair and Wig Designer

Speaking with Jodi Mancuso, you immediately believe the story that Amy Poehler and Maya Rudolph’s “Bronx Beat” sketches were inspired by her. (Rudolph’s character is even named Jodi.) 

“It probably came about from them making fun of me and my accent and me always complaining, which was pretty funny. We all did to each other,” Mancuso says. “And then it’s just one of those things where you hang out in a hair room and that’s just what happens, you start finding a sketch somewhere.

“I had two small children, and I was just always bitching about something,” she adds, calling the premise of the sketch “pretty on point.”

Though her days as a mom from the Bronx perpetually exist on YouTube for all the world to see, Mancuso says she lives her life in a bubble — a “wig bubble.”

A wig bubble is essentially a “Ziplock bag with tape,” Mancuso explains, a “very old-school” way of making wigs for hosts, cast members, guests, and even extras. “We basically put plastic over their head, like we’re going to kill them.”

We told you the sketch tracks.

Mancuso and her shop make 80 wigs per week for an episode. (Lady Gaga alone wore 13 wigs in her episode this past season.) 

There’s just one problem: Building a wig typically takes 80-100 hours, Mancuso says, and she only has… Thursday. So she and her team of 21 hairdressers take their craft very seriously. 

“If a wig fell off, I would probably have a heart attack,” she says. “I just ruined somebody’s sketch — it became about my wig.”

Mancuso says she prefers her department to “not be seen, quite honestly.” And she gets especially nervous about creating wigs to be worn during an impression of a real person.

“There’s so many reasons why someone may not look like someone,” she says. The goal is to not let the hair be one of those reasons.

Asked about the Trump wig worn by James Austin Johnson, Mancuso trails off into a fantasy: “If I never look at that man’s hair again…”

Tom Broecker, SNL Costume Designer and Producer

It’s a nice reprieve when Tom Broecker can re-use a costume for a recurring sketch. But that doesn’t always work with anniversary specials. His team needed to make new costumes, for example, when Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd reprised their 1970s “Wild and Crazy Guys,” the Festrunk Brothers, for the 40th.  

Broecker says the most difficult part of his job is dressing sketch actors as politicians — particularly male politicians. 

“Most people don’t buy their clothes today and wear them tomorrow, right?” he says. “They go into their closet, and their closet has clothes from five years ago, eight years ago, 10 years ago.”

Ties tend to be refreshed even less, creating a “tricky” situation when “duplicating a particular moment,” Broecker says.

“Us trying to find that tie might be a needle in the haystack,” he continues.

The solution? Make the tie. Broecker and his team work with the show’s graphics pros and a fabric printer to make a facsimile. They have also reproduced particular T-shirts, and even jewelry. 

Adding to the pressure is the fact that the Sunday morning news shows have developed a habit of highlighting SNL’s recreations. 

“Sunday mornings, a lot of times, they’ll flash up a picture of a cold-opening sketch, and then they’ll flash up the real event — we call those ‘side by sides,’” Broecker says. “We try and get it as close as we can to the actual event.”

Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ unique necklaces and pins were especially challenging last year. So was her wardrobe when she appeared live on the show just before the election.

“We had been led to believe that she was wearing one thing, but then, when she got there, found out that she was wearing something else,” Broecker recalls.

It was especially challenging because her planned sketch called for her to look in a mirror at herself — actually Rudolph playing Harris. The veep’s unexpected wardrobe led to “a very frantic 40 minutes of quick alterations and changes,” Broecker says. 

But he credits his “magical team” for pulling it off. The sketch was a hit.

Saturday Night Live returns for its 51st season this fall on NBC.

Main image: Liz Patrick directs an episode of Saturday Night Live. Photo By Rosalind O' Connor / NBC

All photos courtesy of NBC

The production designers tasked with that responsibility rely on extensive research, solid knowledge of tone, and their own creative interpretations. 

“We’ve all worked in these different milieus and done that research. That’s the starting point,” says Dune: Prophecy production designer Tom Meyer. “When you have that background it gives you the footing you need to abstract and tell our stories. We’re offshoots and we have a tone we’re trying to work in, but ultimately we’re trying to build our own worlds.”

The stakes are especially high when a project has a passionate fandom with high expectations and extensive knowledge. The aim is to evoke emotional connections similar to those provided by the original source. 

“The Last of Us is based on a game, so that world is somewhat defined,” says Don Macauley, who heads production design on The Last of Us.

Also Read: FYCit Wants to Help You Keep Track of Award Season Events

“Satisfying the gamers can be a struggle to a certain degree. But our first point of reference is the game, and then whether we lean into an element of the world or not depends on the situation the characters are in. We want to stick closely to the game, but we also want to do better than it.” 

The Penguin production designer Kalina Ivanov took the canon that DC fans have followed for decades and expanded it into the poorer slums of Gotham.

The production filmed in New York, and she focused on bringing in arches and other gothic elements in Queens, the Bronx and Yonkers to set the show’s tone and feel.  

“We are down on the ground and in the streets and so we carefully avoided Manhattan,” she says. “We also brought in 40 tons of dirt to create that world.”

In Dune: Prophecy, Tom Meyer reverse-engineered the look of Denis Villeneuve’s two Dune films, based on Frank Herbert’s novels, to go back 10,000 years before the films take place. 

“Herbert references 10,000 planets and there’s dozens featured in the books,” he says. “As a designer we have to give an identity to each planet so the audience can clue into it, and even if it’s a planet from the movie world, we have to create what it looks like years and years before.”

House of the Dragon designer Jim Clay faced a similar challenge: The series is set 200 years before the events of Game of Thrones. His team began with the established Red Keep interior set from the initial series, and developed it into a Machiavellian-inspired world of distrust and fear under the rule of the Targaryen family. Then there’s Harrenhal Castle, the largest castle in the Seven Kingdoms. Clay and his team had the chance to reimagine those visuals with the castle’s reintroduction in Season 2.  

“It’s this enormous, ruined castle built by a deranged mind and a place where you felt ill at ease,” he says. “I read a lot of T.S. Eliot at the time and wanted to create this sense of time and past and present and future all merging into one. Are you living your past? Are you witnessing your future?” 

Production designers say they need to be involved in a project as early as possible to strike the right balance between fealty to source material and imaginative expansion. The prefer to start their work when writers are still outlining. 

Meyer says even bullet points are helpful to help his teams do research, create sketches and build ideas. Then they hand those ideas back to the writers, who use them to enhance their stories. 

“You have to collaborate, and that’s liberating, because that’s how you get something new that you haven’t seen,” Meyer says. 

All of the worlds involve elements of CGI.

“We overlap 100% with the visual effects department. It’s a water-tight collaboration,” says Clay of House of the Dragon, where certain sets are constructed specifically to work with CGI dragons and other effects. “My brief has always been to root the built world in reality, and then that allows us to get away with stretching the envelope so it’s believable but unfamiliar.”

Macaulay says that for The Last of Us, his team does most sets and big builds in 3D models shared with post.

But the production designers also base their work strongly on real locations that give their worlds a sense of lived-in groundedness. 

For The Penguin, Ivanov was inspired by pre-Renaissance Italy. For Dune: Prophecy, Meyer was interested in how a post-technology world would look, and imagined old Greco-Roman ruins to create a primitive futurism where brick and mortar are no longer the building materials of choice. For The Last of Us, Macaulay sought out images of nature taking over in places that have been abandoned.  

Once they know generally how their worlds should look, they face the vast challenges of bringing them to life. Obstacles range from weather to budget constraints to last-minute alterations and pivots. But these challenges lead to creative wins that keep them passionate and excited about their work. 

One of Clay’s biggest challenges on Season 2 of House of the Dragon was the river battles. Macaulay remembers seeing The Last of Us game creator Neil Druckmann get emotional while touring the space museum set. Ivanov will never forget creating a 4,500 square-foot abandoned trolley station that connected to original architecture. And Meyer delights in building immense sets that the actors could get lost in.  

“We all strive to achieve film-quality worlds,” he says. “It’s like when you hear an actor say they become their character when they put the costume on. Our sets allow actors to hopefully achieve a higher level and execution, and forget they’re on a set. That’s the really satisfying part.”

The Last of Us, House of the Dragon, Dune: Prophecy and The Penguin are streaming on Max.

Main image: Bella Ramsey and Isabela Merced in The Last of Us. Photo by Liane Hentscher/HBO

The legacy of the Dark Knight

It takes a special film to smash box office records daily and change the Oscar awards nomination process. The Academy’s failure to nominate the movie for Best Picture triggered a furious backlash and discussion about the merits of superhero movies. Some felt there was a bias in the Academy against them. 

Breaking the mold

One of the film’s biggest legacies is how it changed superhero movies. “The Dark Knight” moved away from the “save the world”-type narrative common in superhero flicks and went for a “grounded in reality” approach. It was more a crime-thriller drama than a superhero piece, a style that became frequent in later movies of the genre. 

Encouraging a media craze for “geek entertainment” 

The success of “The Dark Knight” impacted the wider media, who couldn’t get enough of “geek entertainment” and “geek interests.” The film was helped by the unfortunate death of Heath Ledger before its release, which catapulted it into the mainstream headlines and generated hype and curiosity — and was an overwhelming success. The media loved it and became eager to report on anything “nerdy” entertainment-wise or interests-wise. 

Leading to games

The movie world learned big from George Lucas’ decision to accept a reduced fee for directing the “Star Wars” movies in return for sequel rights and merchandising rights. Although he struck the deal with the movie company because he wanted creative control over his work, the decision earned him $20 billion in merchandising, plus $4 billion when he sold Lucasfilm. Today, other movies, including “The Dark Knight,” inspire games and other merchandise for fans who want to engage with their favorite films.

The Dark Knight online slot (Playtech)

The film was so popular it spawned two different but identically titled “Dark Knight” slots, one by Microgaming and one by Playtech. You’ll find "The Dark Knight" in many online casinos in Canada so you can engage further with the film. The Playtech version is a six-reel slot that offers four different progressive jackpots, high bet sizes, and 50 paylines. As expected, characters such as Bruce Wayne, the Joker, Batman, Two Face, and more are symbols. The Joker and Batman are bonus symbols too and give you re-spins. There are also Gotham City, Dark Knight, and Agent of Chaos free games. 

The Dark Knight online slot (Microgaming) 

Microgaming’s version is a dark 5-reel progressive slot and places a serious Mega jackpot up for grabs. Even the base game of this well-invested slot offers lots of surprises in the form of free spins, cash awards, and reels of scatter symbols that can combine with multipliers. Bruce Wayne, the Joker, Commissioner Gordon, and other characters are high-value symbols, and there are various special features, such as free spins, additional types of wilds, a free spins accumulator, and more. 

The Dark Knight Rises (Playtech)

Playtech also created a slot based on the third movie in the Dark Knight trilogy. This online slot features five reels, 564 ways to win, and a progressive jackpot. Players can win up to 25 times the original payout, thanks to the slot’s multipliers, and the game features a free spins bonus which also contains multipliers and wilds. Lucky players can also enjoy several free games features. 

Remembering and engaging with the film in other ways

The popularity of “The Dark Knight” has inspired a dizzying array of merchandise to accompany it. Comics and novels of the titles were produced alongside the three movies to expand the lore around Batman. 

Then there are statues, including small figures and collectibles. Of note are Hot Toy “Cosbaby” versions of characters. Fans can also buy action figures and DC Multiverse figures. “Builders” can entertain themselves with Lego minifigure versions of characters or with Lego versions of the Batmobile. Hot Wheels fans can buy Batmobiles. 

That’s just a small selection of the toys available. There are board games as well as online slots. Then there are T-shirts, baseball caps, jewelry, footwear, keyrings, fancy dress costumes, and more. Fans can even buy Batman-themed food and pet food products. 

“The Dark Knight” earned itself a permanent place in the hearts of many film fans, thanks to its realistic narrative style and strong performances from Christian Bale and the late Heath Ledger. The film left a powerful legacy and spawned a wide range of merchandise, including online slots, toys, games, books, and more. For many, it will always be the best superhero movie ever.

But first: There's a big joke, going back decades, that Batman and Robin are gay. This wonderful article is not about that. This is about things in the Batman and Robin relationship that everyone takes for granted, but are actually exceptionally strange, when you stop and think about them.

Also, we aren't here to scold fictional characters. If anything, the messiness of the Batman and Robin relationship makes it more fascinating, from a storytelling standpoint, because it muddles with the boring portrayal of Batman as perfect.

In fact, as we shall show, the man who dresses up as a bat every night is a total weirdo. Starting with...

No. 1 Robin's Costume

Batman, famously, dresses in dark colors as camouflage, allowing him to blend into the night, invisible to criminals. He's able to dodge their gunfire in part because he's so hard to see.

Robin, meanwhile, wears the brightest costume possible. While fighting alongside Batman. The Caped Crusader hides in the shadows, while his youthful ward... wears a garish red, yellow and green costume that attracts attention. And bullets, we assume.

We saw a Batman satire once where Robin was called "Target," and that satire was right on the money. We would link to it if we could find it, but unfortunately when we Google "Robin costume target" we just get pages of Robin costumes... from Target.

No. 2 Robin Is a Minor

There have been many Robins over the years, and while their origin stories have changed over the decades, all are presented as minors at the time they meet Batman. Remember he's called "The Boy Wonder."

Dick Grayson, the first Robin, first appeared in Detective Comics #38 (eleven issues after Batman debuted in Detective Comics #27) and was a junior member of the acrobatics troupe The Flying Graysons, led by his parents, John and Mary. When criminals kill them, Batman takes on Dick Grayson as his ward, training him to fight crime.

Yes, Dick Grayson was an acrobat, which is dangerous. But taking a minor out on the streets at night to fight criminals with guns — in a brightly colored costume, no less — is child endangerment.

While we don't know what state Gotham is in, we do know it resembles New York City, and that under New York Penal Law 260.10(1), "a person is guilty of endangering the welfare of a child when... he or she knowingly acts in a manner likely to be injurious to the physical, mental or moral welfare of a child less than seventeen years old or directs or authorizes such child to engage in an occupation involving a substantial risk of danger to his or her life or health."

It's a Class A misdemeanor, which can result in up to a year in jail.

No. 3. Batman Calls Robin 'Chum'

To add to the endangerment thing... Batman often calls Robin "chum."

There are two meanings of the word chum. It can mean friend — or it can refer to the stuff you throw to sharks, as bait.

We wonder how Batman is using it.

Also Read: All 10 Batman Movies Ranked Worst to Best

The Mask

Again, inequality. Batman wears a cowl that covers his entire face, except for his mouth. Robin wears a masquerade-party style mask that covers only his eyes.

If the point of a mask is hiding your identity, so no enemies can harm you while you're in civilian mode, or by attacking your friends and family, Robin's mask is a real problem. Batman is endangering not just Robin, but also himself, Alfred, Batgirl, and... I guess that's their whole inner circle. But still.

Even the modernized Robin of the '90s, played by Chris O'Donnell, wore a little mask that concealed almost nothing. Ditto for Batgirl (Alicia Silverstone).

The Robin Hood Thing

Robin was modeled on Robin Hood. In 1940, when Robin was introduced, Robin Hood was a red-hot pop culture property thanks to the 1938 Errol Flynn hit The Adventures of Robin Hood (see publicity still, above).

But Robin Hood is famous for two things. One is stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, and the other is shooting arrows.

Robin, on the other hand, works for a billionaire, helping him beat up street criminals, and doesn't even get arrows, which might be helpful, given the criminals' guns. Especially considering his loud, gaudy, bullet-magnet costume,

Batman and Robin and Death

As we mentioned, there have been several Robins through the years. When Dick Grayson grew up and became Nightwing (finally donning a dark colored costume — smart!), he was replaced by another Boy Wonder, Jason Todd, in 1983.

But five years later, in part because fans didn't love Jason Todd, DC Comics introduced the groundbreaking Death in the Family storyline in which The Joker bombed a building with Jason inside — and fans got to call a 900 number to decide if Jason lived or died. Fans voted for him to die. (But don't blame 13-year-old me — I voted for him to live.)

What's even weirder than fans voting to blow up a teenager is that after Jason's death, no one from the state came to say, "Hey — what happened?" No one investigated Bruce Wayne for maybe, potentially, putting the poor boy in harm's way. It was just, "Hey, that kid who looks exactly like Robin never comes around anymore."

Ward

In the classic Batman TV show Adam West's Bruce Wayne would often refer to Dick Grayson as his "youthful ward."

Cornell Law School's Legal Information Institute defines a "ward" as "a person who is under the protection, care , or guardianship of another individual, typically due to being a minor or legally incapacitated." It notes that "courts appoint guardians to oversee the well-being and decision-making of wards who are unable to care for themselves."

This means Bruce Wayne had to go to court and explain that he wanted to take on Dick Grayson as his "ward" — despite being, in the eyes of the court, a total stranger to Grayson.

Wouldn't it be more typical to make someone your foster child? Or adopt him? Maybe. But here's where things may get dark, from a legal standpoint.

A ward, unlike an adopted child, does not receive an inheritance — unless the guardian specifies it in the guardian's will. So it's possible that Batman is endangering Robin, night after night, with no assurance that he will receive any part of the vast Wayne fortune. Which is absolutely chilling.

Amusingly, the youthful ward of the Batman TV show was played by Burt Ward, so maybe the show was just having fun with that.

Aside: Did The People's Joker Get It Right?

While countless Batman stories have skimmed over the weirder parts of the Batman and Robin relationship, it took a low-budget satire to confront it head-on.

The People's Joker, in which filmmaker Vera Drew plays a trans joker trying to break into the Gotham comedy scene, features a satirized version of Carrie Kelley, the version of Robin who appears in Frank Miller's 1986 The Dark Knight Returns.

In The People's Joker, Carrie gender transitions to become Jason Todd, who then enters into a toxic, predatory relationship with Batman, in spite of their age difference and Jason being 17.

Obviously, a sexual relationship between Batman and Robin isn't canon, and Drew is making fun of the aforementioned gay jokes about the Batman and Robin relationship. But what the film gets right is that even in the most charitable interpretation, the Batman and Robin relationship involves a mature, wealthy man putting a much younger, orphaned partner in harm's way. We all them the Dynamic Duo, but one half of the duo holds all the power.

It's weird. And weirdly compelling.

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Main image: Adam West as Batman and Burt Ward as Robin in the Batman TV show. ABC

Starring Al Pacino as Tony Montana, Brian De Palma's 1983 crime epic is one of the most stylishly flamboyant and addictive films of all time.

Here are 12 Scarface behind the scenes Scarface stories, with images from its original promotional campaign.

Tony Montana Was Named for a Certain Football Player

Ever wondered why Tony Montana, the Cuban refugee played by Al Pacino, had so much swagger even before he became a kingpin? Maybe it’s in the name.

Scarface screenwriter Oliver Stone wrote in his excellent memoir, Chasing the Light, that Pacino was named for San Francisco 49ers quarterback Joe Montana, a picture of self-assurance.

Sure, maybe as a Spanish speaker Tony should have been named not montaña, which is Spanish for mountain. But then again mountains were well-represented in Scarface by the many piles of white powder in Tony’s villa.

Many Fs Given

Scarface isn't for kids for a lot of reasons, but let's start with language.

Stone wrote that a certain word starting with F appears in Scarface 183 times.

He also said that actress Joan Collins once joked, “I’ve heard that there are 183 f—-s in the movie, which is more than most people get in a lifetime.”

Michelle Pfeiffer Was Hungry

Michelle Pfeiffer scored the role of Elvira, the at-first reluctant wife of Tony, over many of Hollywood’s top actresses — even though her biggest part at the time had been Grease 2.

She truly sacrificed for the role.

“Did I feel hot? No, actually, I was hungry,” she said on CNN’s Piers Morgan Tonight in 2012. “I was playing a coke addict and I couldn’t eat. And by the end of it… it went long. You know, it was supposed to be probably a four month shoot and it — it stretched out to six months. And I was really hungry by the end of it.”

She was outstanding in the role, but we’re sorry to hear that.

It Could Have Been Robert De Niro

Robert De Niro said in a joint interview with Pacino for GQ in 2019, that he remembered urging Pacino to make Scarface, telling him, “if you don’t do it, I’m gonna do it,”

Pacino, meanwhile, said he remembers that De Niro and Martin Scorsese were “playing with the idea” of a Scarface movie. 

It’s one of many times Pacino and De Niro nearly played each other’s roles.

That’s Pacino above, with Scarface cinematographer John A. Alonzo.

Al Pacino Kept His Nose Clean

For all the drugs his character did, Pacino — seen above with Scarface director Brian De Palma — took a pass, according to Stone.

“It surprised me that Al had never snorted cocaine or known anything about drugs,” Stone wrote in his memoir, adding that producer Martin Bregman told him Pacino “had a serious alcohol problem when younger but was now completely dry. Yet he had no problem behaving onscreen like the ultimate coke addict.”

Not that surprising, really — Pacino is one of the greatest actors of all.

Nobody Nose

While Pacino was wise to avoid hoovering actual drugs, his alternative also had its problems.

He told FOX 5 Washington DC in 2015 that the fake drugs he snorted also did some damage:

“I knew that with Scarface, they combined it with stuff. I mean, not narcotics. Something else. To cut it down. But for years after that, I have had things up in there. I don’t what happened to my nose, but it’s changed. My breathing apparatus has been sort of altered a little,” he said.

It Felt Like a Likely Hit

Stone wrote in his memoir that De Palma (above, with Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) had “suffered a significant financial setback with Blow Out,” his previous film, and believed that Scarface had the potential to be “a big commercial film.”

It ended up being the 16th highest-grossing films of 1983 — but also one of the most memorable.

Stone says it was initially considered “more of a flop than a success,” but that he soon realized it had staying power and influence.

De Palma Was Struggling

Though Scarface is one of our favorite Brian De Palma movies — and we love Brian De Palma movies — Stone wrote in his memoir that the director was going through a tough time as he made Scarface.

Stone wrote that the director was “overweight, slow physically, wearing the same copy of a pressed khaki uniform that an engineer might, throughout the production. He was also, from what I gather, in the middle of a divorce from his wife, Nancy Allen, which must not have helped his mood. But he was, no question, brilliant.”

Also, please note that at least in the photo above, De Palma, right, does not appear to be wearing the type of outfit Stone describes.

Of Course, There Were Light Moments, Too

We love this behind the scenes shot of Pfeiffer and Pacino, looking a lot more relaxed than Elvira and Tony Montana ever did.

Full Circle

Scarface marked the acting debut of the very charismatic Steven Bauer, right, who later played another drug kingpin in Breaking Bad.

The show also cast Scarface veteran Mark Margolis.

And Breaking Bad creator Vince Gillgan’s love of the film was always apparent: He used to famously say that his main character, Walter White, would transform during the series “from Mr. Chips to Scarface.” Which he did.

Too Much for the Author of Slaughterhouse Five

Scarface is famously violent, but among those who found it a little too violent was Slaughterhouse Five author Kurt Vonnegut, who walked out during the infamous chainsaw scene about half an hour into the film, muttering, “too gory for me.”

Vonnegut always liked to blow minds with ideas, rather than sharp objects, so we’re not too surprised.

That’s Pacino and De Palma above, reading something other than Slaughterhouse Five.

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Main image: Michelle Pfeiffer in a 1983 promotional still for Scarface. Universal Pictures.

Why are we talking about Christmas movies in June?

Because nothing makes us miss Christmas like summer.

Die Hard (1988)

Let's get this out of the way: Die Hard is the ultimate "is it a Christmas movie" Christmas movie. No one thought of it as one when it came out — it was just a great action movie about NYPD cop John McClane trying to save his estranged wife Holly Gennero (Bonnie Bedelia) from a Los Angeles office tower.

But in decades of internet hot takes and interpretation, Die Hard has come to be pretty universally recognized as a Christmas movie, after all.

Holly's name is very important to this reading of Die Hard — not just because of the Christmas overtones of "holly," but also because she's dropped McClane as her last name, a signal of how the family is disintegrating. Die Hard, like Christmas, is ultimately about a family reuniting and creating a future.

It also has a proud place on our list of the 11 Most Helpful Ventilation Shafts in Movies.

The Apartment (1960)

Like everything in Billy Wilder's magnificent The Apartment, the Christmas element of the film is wisely, beautifully understated. The film is about Fran (Shirley MacClaine), an elevator operator, and her secret affair with bigwig Jeff Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray).

Meanwhile, the well-meaning Bud Baxter (Jack Lemmon) pines after her, even while he allows Sheldrake and other executives to use his apartment to carry out their affairs, including Sheldrake's liaisons with Fran.

At the company Christmas party — a symbol of office excess — Fran learns Sheldrake is stringing her along. At a time for celebrating family and togetherness, she realizes she's not just the other women, but one of many other women with whom Sheldrake has had affairs. Things take a dark turn — but turn out rather merrily by New Year's Eve.

Like It's a Wonderful Life — which isn't on this list because it's so obviously a Christmas movie — The Apartment succeeds by acknowledging the grim parts of life, not just highlighting the jolly ones.

Little Women (2019)

Nothing about Greta Gerwig's lovely adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's 1868-89 two-volume novel about the March sisters screams Christmas movie... until a Christmas scene where, joyously, Bob Odenkirk's Father March returns home from the Civil War.

"My little women," he declares, with total naturalism, underselling the title of the film with one of the best line readings in a movie that's filled with wonderful acting.

It's an incredibly cathartic and moving moment, in large part because it doesn't try too hard for big emotion.

Tangerine (2015)

Like Die Hard, Tangerine takes place around Christmas in Los Angeles — a place where winter temperatures in the 70s can make it easy to forget its the holiday season, unless you're at an outdoor mall.

Add to that the fact that when this excellent Sean Baker film came out, coverage of it focused mostly on two noteworthy points: First, that it is a frank, compassionate and funny look at the lives of transgender sex workers (played by Mya Taylor and Kitana Kiki Rodriguez, both outstanding), at a time when trans people were rarely well-represented on film. And second, it was shot all on iPhones, when that was very rare. It heralded a potential breakthrough in indie filmmaking.

But underneath those two points is something very traditional: Tangerine is a movie about a family at Christmas. It's a found family, yes, and not the kind of family that is typically depicted in sugarcoated Christmas movies. But that makes Tangerine all the more compelling.

The Terminator (1984)

Yes, The Terminator. No, it doesn't take place around Christmas. And no, you didn't miss a scene where Arnold Schwarzenegger dresses up as Santa. But The Terminator is perhaps the most true Christmas movie of any film on this list, because it is so obviously inspired by the Biblical account of the birth of Christ.

Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor symbolizes the Virgin Mary — a teenager who will soon give birth to humanity's savior, by extraordinary means: her meeting with Michael Biehn's Kyle Reese, a time traveler from the future. Her son, John Connor, shares initials with Jesus Christ.

SkyNet, the terrifying AI that sends The Terminator back in time to kill Sarah before her baby is born, is not unlike King Herod of Judea, who ordered the "massacre of the innocents" — the murder of Bethlehem's newborns — because he feared Jesus would one day seize his kingdom.

Interestingly, James Cameron came up with the idea of The Terminator in Rome, not so far from the Vatican.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)

Set around Christmas in — again — Los Angeles, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is the directorial debut of screenwriter Shane Black, who is rather famous for setting films around the holidays (including Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout.)

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang starts off as a play on perhaps the least Christmas-y movie genre, noirs, with some deft Hollywood satire. But it embraces the Christmas season as actor Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey Jr.) and private investigator Perry van Shrike (Val Kilmer) team up with Santa-suited Harmony Faith Lane (Michelle Monaghan), a woman with many secrets.

Notably, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang came at a point in Robert Downey's career when he was still considered a risk, due to a history with drugs. He started his comeback with 2003's The Singing Detective, and built up to landing the lead role in 2008's Iron Man — a casting choice that made him one of the most bankable stars in Hollywood history. Christmas is all about second chances, and Downey seized his.

Which brings us to the final film on our list...

Iron Man 3 (2013)

You would think more Marvel movies would embrace the Christmas spirit, given how tied in they are to marketing and toys. Disney+'s Hawkeye made great use of the holiday season, and so does Iron Man 3.

When Jon Favreau, director of Iron Man and Iron Man 2, decided not to direct Iron Man 3 (though he did return as Happy Hogan), Downey took the opportunity to reunite with his Kiss Kiss Bang Bang director, Shane Black.

Despite Black's long history of Christmas-based action movies, he didn't originally intend to set Iron Man 3 during the holiday — but co-writer Drew Pearce brought him around to the idea, as SlashFilm reported.

Black told the outlet: "There's something at Christmas that unites everybody and it already sets a stage within the stage, that wherever you are, you're experiencing this world together."

Iron Man 3 is, appropriately enough, about reunions, second chances, and finding hope when things seem dark. It even has an apparent resurrection, so maybe it's also an Easter movie.

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Main image: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Warner Bros.

10. Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)

Total Gross Worldwide: $300,228,084

The fourth installment in the Resident Evil franchise, Resident Evil: Afterlife was the first movie in the series to be shot in 3D.

Beginning in Tokyo, it follows Milla Jovovich as Alice, who attacks Umbrella HQ with her clones. They later go to Alaska, Los Angeles, and a cargo tanker off the coast called Arcadia, battling the undead and other monstrous folk.

9. Annabelle: Creation (2017)

Total Gross Worldwide: $306,592,201

The fourth installment in The Conjuring universe, Annabelle: Creation is the second Annabelle spinoff movie, telling the backstory of the haunted doll, Annabelle, and the little girl who gave the demonic spirit who possesses the doll its name.

People just can't get enough of that creepy doll.

8. Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2017)

Total Gross Worldwide: $312,242,626

When a franchise is good, people will watch it to the bitter end. This is the sixth installment in the Resident Evil franchise, following the first 2002 movie which itself was based on a video game of the same name.

The storyline of the series follows a research facility called the Hive located underneath Raccoon City. When a genetically engineered T-virus contaminates the hive, the AI-powered Red Queen seals it up and kills everyone inside to prevent its spread.

The Final Chapter finds Milla Jovovich reprising her original role as Alice, in a fight to save mankind after the T-virus has spread to the entire world, creating monsters, zombies and demons.

7. The Conjuring (2013)

Total Gross Worldwide: $320,415,166

The original The Conjuring has got to be among the best horror movies in recent memory. It's got everything you want: suspense, jump scares, and an absolutely terrifying and grotesque reveal of the demon-witch Bathsheba who possesses poor Mrs. Perron. It spares us too much gore, but it delivers on the supernatural, unseen elements that we argue make it even scarier.

This mighty movie was so successful, it paved the way for a franchise of nine total movies in The Conjuring universe.

6. The Conjuring 2 (2016)

Total Gross Worldwide: $322,811,702

The Conjuring 2 marks the first appearance of the evil nun who stars in another movie later on in this list. Vera Farmiga reprises her role as Lorraine Warren from the first Conjuring movie in The Conjuring 2. But this time, she and Patrick Wilson's Ed Warren are in London investigating a home that a single mother insists is inhabited by evil, claiming that her daughter is suffering from demonic possession.

5. A Quiet Place (2018)

Total Gross Worldwide: $340,955,294

John Krasinski had a hit with A Quiet Place, which he directed, co-wrote and starred in opposite his real-life wife, Emily Blunt.

The story takes place in a post-apocalyptic version of the world in which the surviving humans have to constantly hide from alien monsters with an extremely keen ability to hear. Thus, they have to live their lives in almost complete silence.

4. The Nun (2018)

Total Gross Worldwide: $366,050,119

There's that nun again. When a young nun takes her own life in Romania, a priest and another young nun are called in to investigate. Set in 1952, The Nun is part of The Conjuring universe, since it's a spin-off from The Conjuring 2 which features said evil nun.

This one stars Demián Bichir, Taissa Farmiga, and Jonas Bloquet.

3. It Chapter 2 (2019)

Total Gross Worldwide: $473,093,228

Pennywise returns in the second part of It. Stephen King's original 1986 book was so long — 1,168 pages to be exact — that the filmmakers couldn't possibly fit it into one movie. Even the first 1990 film adaptation starring Tim Curry as the killer clown broke it into a two-part ABC miniseries, totaling 3 hours and 12 minutes.

In this sequel, we meet the adult counterparts of the kid gang from the first movie, who reconvene to make good on a pact that set in blood 27 year prior.

Bill Hader plays Richie, James McAvoy plays Bill, Jessica Chastain plays Beverly, James Ransome plays Eddie, Isaiah Mustafa plays Mike, Jay Ryan as Ben, Andy Bean plays Stan, and Skarsgård returns as Pennywise.

2. World War Z (2013)

Total Gross Worldwide: $540,455,876

In this horror-action movie plays on the classic zombie trope when a lethal virus rips through civilization, infecting people with a single bite. Brad Pitt's character is a former U.N. investigator who flees with his family when a normal traffic jam turns into an absolute disaster scenario.

But soon, Pitt's Gerry Lane must leave his family in order to lead the charge to save the world.

This film is absolutely epic, with state-of-the-art CGI for its time and breathtakingly horrifying scenes of what monstrosities humanity devolves into when the world falls into chaos and society ceases to have order.

1. It (2017)

Total Gross Worldwide: $702,781,748

This adaptation of Stephen King’s classic horror novel about a killer clown is the highest grossing horror movie of the 2010s.

Starring Bill Skarsgård as the iconic Pennywise the clown, it also featured a cast of adolescent actors to play the group of seven kids from the town of Derry who team up to take the clown down: Jaeden Martell as Bill, Finn Wolfhard as Richie, Jack Dylan Grazer as Eddie, Jeremy Ray Taylor as Ben, Sophia Lillis as Beverly, Chosen Jacobs as Mike, and Wyatt Olef as Stan. The cast also included Owen Teague as Patrick Hockstetter, Nicholas Hamilton as Henry Bowers, and Jake Sim as Belch Huggins.

Together, the seven kids have to fight back against the mean kids in town, their twisted parents, and the biggest villain of them all: It.

Watch out, though — by the end of this movie, you'll float, too!

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Main Image: A publicity still of Jessica Chastain and Sophia Lillis for It: Chapter Two. Warner Bros.