Verbal Diorama

The original Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997) wasn't a huge hit at cinemas. It found its real audience on home video and cable, building into a genuine phenomenon almost after the fact. That success...

Back to the Future Part II wasn't really supposed to exist as its own film. The original Back to the Future 's "TO BE CONTINUED" tag was actually a post-hoc addition for home video, not a plan, after studio head Sid...

Great scott! Where we’re going, we don’t need roads, and if my calculations are correct, when this baby hits 88 miles per hour, you're going to get the history and legacy of Back to the Future ! It's a story of how...

Long before Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly had names, they had mugshots. In 1924, Chicago tabloids were consumed by Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner, two unrelated women tried for murder and both acquitted; largely because...

In 2008, Ben Stiller made a war movie about people making a war movie, and in doing so, accidentally made one of the more prescient satires of 21st-century Hollywood ego, method acting, and the studio system's addiction...

In 1994, a former video store clerk turned indie provocateur rearranged the crime film and, in the process, rearranged Hollywood itself. Pulp Fiction , Quentin Tarantino & Roger Avary's take on hardboiled detective...

The Shawshank Redemption is now the highest-rated film on IMDb's Top 250, a fixture of cable rotation, and shorthand for cinematic hope itself. But in 1994, it was a box office failure; a $25 million adaptation of a...

Empire Records is like that one friend who everyone loves but didn't quite fit in with the popular crowd. It captured the essence of 90s youth culture, from the angst of its characters to their rebellious spirit against...

Star Wars opened on May 25th, 1977, in 32 American cinemas. The first cut had been a disaster. The director of photography and director were barely speaking. The ILM crew, working in a Van Nuys warehouse in temperatures...

Rogue One was the first anthology movie announced post the Disney takeover of Lucasfilm in 2012; the year after Star Wars Episode VII The Force Awakens had enticed and delighted audiences across the world. The rogue...

Happy 250th birthday to the United States of America! 250 years ago, you became independent from us Brits. We're the King George III in this relationship, and we know it. Alexander Hamilton . You know the name, but you...

In the spring of 1954, a Japanese fishing vessel called the Lucky Dragon No. 5 sailed into the fallout zone of an American hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll. Its crew came home irradiated, and Japan, a nation still raw...

King Kong (1933) was the creation of Merian C. Cooper, one of Hollywood's most extraordinary and least remembered figures, and it arrived at a precise and loaded moment: during the Great Migration, a time of mass...

Two decades in the making, The Meg showcases the sheer absurdity of a 75-foot prehistoric shark lurking in the ocean, and this Kaijune we acknowledge that bigger is just always better when it comes to monster movies...

From the depths of Kaijune comes the King of the Monsters.... GODZILLA ! But not the Godzilla many fans were expecting when a US remake was announced in the '90s, and not the first attempt to make a US version of the...