The definitive 1980s action flick, Die Hard distilled the shoot-’em-up formula to its essence, trapping a cop – Bruce Willis as John McClane – in an office building while bad guys hold the employees hostage. The movie’s greatest asset is its purity – perfectly streamlined even at 132 minutes, there is nothing superfluous to distract

One of Bruce Lee’s signature kung-fu flicks, Enter the Dragon features the actor/martial-arts expert at the height of his performing powers. Small and sinewy, Lee left the impression he didn’t have a muscle he didn’t need – and that he probably could kill you with any one of them. Much of the movie’s opening is

British director John Boorman approached the Arthurian legends with reverence and awe and came away with the passionate and mystical Excalibur. Boorman at one time wanted to film J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Excalibur occasionally shimmers with the same grandeur that director Peter Jackson accomplished in his adaptations. Both movies tap into

Above everything else it has – SUV-sized bugs, dinosaur stampedes, streets of 1930s New York that are as vividly hustling and bustling as Michigan Avenue today – King Kong exudes an unabashed fondness for the 1933 creature feature it updates. This is the movies’ looniest love story, between a blond bombshell and a giant gorilla,

There’s only one way to explain the exhilarating and exhausting emptiness of Quentin Tarantino’s bloody revenge flick starring Uma Thurman. Facing a severe case of writer’s block, Tarantino must have tried to scribble his way out of it, couldn’t and decided to go ahead and make a movie out of the whims his writing exercises