30 Movies That Are Basically Perfect
Movies are all products of their time, but comedies are especially tricky. Laughter is often based on behavior that is in opposition to societal norms, so what’s funny to one generation may seem stale or toothless a few decades later. Which is why it’s remarkable that this nearly 78-year-old screwball farce from writer/director Preston Sturges…
18 Halloween Thrillers That Are Scary but Not Gory
Screenshot: The Conjuring/Warner Bros.I give director James Wan an awful lot of credit. After making a boatload of money creating the Saw franchise (a series of movies that popularized the term “torture porn”), he turned around and reinvented the spooky haunted house genre in Insidious and The Conjuring. Tastes in thrillers vary wildly, but it’s…
30 of the Best Movies That Clock in at 90 Minutes...
Screenshot: Run Lola Run/Sony Pictures ClassicsJust when you thought blockbuster movies couldn’t possibly get any longer, the fine people at Universal Pictures announced the runtime for the next, long-delayed entry in the James Bond series. When it opens in October in the US, No Time to Die is set to keep movie-goers in their seats…
Creator or Creature? A Nightmare Wakes dramatizes the birth of Frankenstein
Alix Wilton Regan stars as Mary Shelley in the throes of creating her timeless literary masterpiece in A Nightmare Wakes.It's one of the most famous origin stories in literary history. One summer night in 1816 in Geneva, Lord Byron hosted a gathering of his fellow Romantics, including Percy Shelley and his lover (soon-to-be wife), Mary…
Remote, Cold Area Rock Had ‘Frankenstein’ Starts
THE WOODLANDS, Texas — Less than three months after the New Horizons spacecraft zoomed past a distant, cold space rock, scientists are beginning to piece together the story of how that object, nicknamed Ultima Thule, came to be. In a series of scientific presentations held March 18 at the 50th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, mission…
Here Are the Genuine (and Freaky) Experiments That Influenced ‘Frankenstein’
On Jan. 17 1803, a young man named George Forster was hanged for murder at Newgate prison in London. After his execution, as often happened, his body was carried ceremoniously across the city to the Royal College of Surgeons, where it would be publicly dissected. What actually happened was rather more shocking than simple dissection…
