Whiplash is a 2014 movie drama written and directed by Damien Chazelle. It tells the story of Andrew Neiman, a talented young drummer who is attending a prestigious conservatory and studying jazz. He is taken under the wing of a brilliant and...

Clear Light of Day is perhaps Anita Desai’s most beloved work, notable for its lush prose and compelling, compassionate look at the inner lives of an Indian family. It is also her most autobiographical work, taking place in the same area where she...

Author Elie Wiesel wrote Night (1960) about his experience that he and his family endured in the concentration camps during World War II between 1944 and 1945, primarily taking place the notorious camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. More than just...

Nosferatu is arguably the first great horror movie. Nearly 100 years after it was made, it can still inspire terror, revulsion, and dread. But we're lucky that we even have copies to see today.

The film was made under strange circumstances, to say...

The Fisher King is a comedy-drama movie released in 1991 to critical acclaim. It was written by Richard LaGravanese and directed by Terry Gilliam and was the first movie that Gilliam directed that he had not also written. It was also the first...

The genre of horror buddy comedy was not particularly common at the time that Ghostbusters was released, and it redefined the genre in unforeseeable ways. Star and writer Dan Aykroyd initially imagined that Ghostbusters would be a star vehicle for...

Goodfellas is perhaps one of the best-known and most-loved mafia films of all time. Released in 1990 and directed by Martin Scorsese, the film is based on Nicholas Pileggi's book Wiseguy, about the real life of Henry Hill, and it takes many of its...

Singin’ in the Rain is generally regarded as Hollywood’s greatest original movie musical. Like The Wizard of Oz before it, Singin’ in the Rain is an original musical motion picture not based on an existing musical work. Unlike that fantasy about...

Some Like It Hot is a 1959 comedy film directed by Billy Wilder and starring Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis. The film is based on the French movie Fanfares Of Love, a film with a nearly identical plot. Fanfares of Love, like Some Like...

In 2014, Christopher Nolan's epic science-fiction odyssey Interstellar exploded into theaters with the kind of gravitas associated with only a handful of its genre predecessors. It was Nolan's first movie after finishing direction on the Dark...

Perhaps no other work by William Shakespeare—and certainly none of the Bard’s tragedies—has been adapted for the stage or screen in a looser manner than Romeo and Juliet. The popularity of the play and its expansive potential for adaptation is in...

His Girl Friday was directed and produced by Howard Hawks in 1940, adapted from a stage play (and 1931 film) called The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. Hecht and MacArthur, with the help of Charles Lederer, adapted the script from...

All About Eve was a critically acclaimed film in 1950 when it came out, and brought huge accolades for its cast as well as its director Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Mankiewicz adapted the witty and sophisticated script from a short story called "The...

"The Liar" was published by Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) in December 1963. It is the story of a man who deeply wants to understand himself and goes through a metamorphosis on his journey of self-discovery. The voice of the speaker is closely...

Uncle Vanya, Scenes of Country Life in Four Acts (1897) is one of Russian playwright Anton Chekov’s most notable dramas and a mainstay of the theater. The play is set at the estate of the first wife of Professor Serebryakov, where he and his...

Rosemary's Baby is a 1968 psychological horror film directed by Roman Polanski, with a screenplay adapted from Ira Levin's best's selling 1967 novel of the same name. It was Polanski's first feature to be distributed by a major Hollywood studio...

Many critics and film historians point to April 24, 1944 as the birth date of film noir, for it was on that date that Double Indemnity premiered. As is the case with so many other things to come out of Hollywood, film noir may be shaving a year or...