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"Millions of galaxies of hundreds of millions of stars, in a speck on one in a blink. That’s us, lost in space." — Vincent, Collateral
Though he's most widely known for his action movies — the Mission: Impossible movies, in particular — superstar actor Tom Cruise has also starred in a handful of sci-fi movies in his career, including War of the Worlds (2005), his highest grossing domestic release to date. After an eight-year hiatus from sci-fi, Cruise will return to the genre on April 19th in Oblivion, a post-apocalyptic epic from director Joseph Kosinski (Tron: Legacy) in which Cruise plays one of the last drone (read: clone) workers on an Earth that is all but abandoned following a devastating war with an alien race known as the Scavs.
In anticipation of Oblivion's imminent release, we thought this would be a great time to look back on Cruise's rather extensive filmography to determine, with your help, which movies contributed to making him the superstar he is today. Take off your mask (as our own Richard Roeper pointed out in his book, Cruise wears masks in many of his later films), quit jumping on the sofa and help us choose Cruise's best movies.
Rate the Top 10 Best Tom Cruise Movies >>
Posted 04.01.13 by BrentJS -
"A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality." — John Lennon
Some of the most imaginative films in motion picture history are inspired by, based on, or even take place within, dreams. This is not really that surprising considering comparisons between the two have been made since the birth of cinema, with Hollywood often referred to as the "dream factory." Psychologists have long noted that the collection of sounds and images that comprise both movies and dreams are heavily steeped in symbolism and latent content and that both experiences arouse similar psychological mechanisms in the participants.
Even the most pedestrian of movies are akin to dreams in the way that they transport us away from our everyday lives and allow us to experience people, places, events, and even emotions that might otherwise be foreign to us. But, the similarities between the two are never more apparent than when dreams are represented on screen. Pour yourself a nightcap or nice cup of chamomile tea, put on your PJs and help us rate the best movies about dreams.
Rate the Top 10 Best Movies About Dreams >>
Posted 01.28.13 by BrentJS -
Everything Old Foreign is New Again
To the entertainment writers and movie critics who have grown cynical in the face of the seemingly endless stream of sequels, prequels, remakes, and reboots hitting theaters these days, the recent news that Charlize Theron will be starring in an English-language remake of Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy for Lady Vengeance is just another sign that Hollywood is fresh out of ideas. However, according to the writer of the adaptation, William Monahan — who took the already exceptionally good Chinese crime thriller Infernal Affairs and turned it into a script worthy of Martin Scorsese and the Academy called The Departed — that couldn't be further from the truth:
[Screenwriting is] the only popular literary form we’ve got left. Adaptation is a very traditional and honorable endeavor in writing for dramatic performance, and if people don’t know that it leads to a hell of a lot of originality and invention in the right hands, well, I’m not going to provide a reading list."
Monohan describes screenwriting as "drama in English" and said foreign movie remakes are the equivalent of Shakespeare taking foreign stories and doing his own "departures from the material." While we have a hard time comparing the vast majority of foreign movie remakes to Shakespeare, there have been several exceptional ones over the years and even a few that managed to surpass the foreign originals. Turn off the subtitles and help us choose the best English-language adaptations of foreign movies.
Rate the Top 10 Best Foreign Movie Remakes >>
Posted 12.03.12 by BrentJS