Friday the 13th (1980)
The first in a series of truly awful slasher films, Friday the 13th sometimes gets some undeserved credit for being a landmark film in the genre, although clearly, it was Halloween that really nailed down the formula...
Category: Thriller
Private Lessons (1981)
Titillating stuff for its time, Private Lessons was but one of many films to come out in the early 80s about teenage boys that manage to score with older women willing to show them the act...
Last Embrace (1979)
Twelve years he would put his type of influential thriller on the map in The Silence of the Lambs, Jonathan Demme made an homage to the master of the contemporary thriller himself, Alfred Hitchcock. Last Embrace may...
Jaws (1975)
Nearly a year prior to its publication in February 1974, film producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown, in collaboration with Universal Pictures, acquired the rights for a screen adaptation of “Jaws,” a novel being...
Batman Begins (2005)
Easily the best Batman movie made to date (later bested by its sequel), Batman Begins takes an ice-cold franchise and makes it red-hot again by reinventing itself. When we last left the series, Joel Schumacher had run...
Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005)
Mr. and Mrs. Smith is a potentially smart romantic comedy buried underneath too many layers of dumb summer blockbuster action extravaganza. If all you’re looking for is a little jocularity, a little romantic chemistry,...
High Tension (2003)
At first, I questioned the decision to release the French horror flick, High Tension, in the United States dubbed instead of subtitled, as most foreign language films released here would be. After watching the...
Layer Cake (2004)
Adapted by J.J. Connelly from the novel of the same name, Layer Cake was slated to be a Guy Ritchie project, but instead, the producer of Ritchie’s movies, Matthew Vaughn, gives himself the nod as...
Dressed to Kill (1980)
The seed for Dressed to Kill was planted in 1974 when filmmaker Brian De Palma adapted Gerald Walker’s 1970 novel, “Cruising”, about an undercover cop searching underground gay clubs for a serial killer. De...
Eyes of Laura Mars (1978)
John Carpenter began writing a number of script treatments just out of film school, some of which would be turned into movies. Prior to his breakthrough with Halloween, Eyes originally came to producer Jack...