Foster on Film

An exceptionally poor “greatest horror of the ’80s” list that made its way around Facebook inspired me to make a correct listing. So here is the list of the best of ’80s cinematic horror. The lowest ten or so are a bit rough but once you hit the halfway point everything is gold.   #50.

The Marvel One-Shots were a fantastic idea in a long list of fantastic ideas from the Marvel Cinematic Universe team: shorts films that could tell smaller stories, expand on concepts from the features, introduce or flesh out characters, and fill in missing pieces. This brilliant idea was followed by a horrible one: stop making the

I’ve written before that Humphrey Bogart is the greatest film star of all time. That makes Cary Grant the second greatest. This ultimate romantic leading-man doesn’t have the insane number of masterpieces under his belt that Bogart does, but he has multiple. And as far as generally good films go, he’s got more than Bogart,

The best film stars are defined by their voices and none had a finer voice than Ronald Colman; I would bet it has been imitated more often than any other. His good looks got him parts in silent cinema, but when the talkies came along, he really bloomed—the man with the mellifluous voice. But even with

The greatest director of the studio age and by my account, the greatest director of all time, Curtiz was a master of the craft, and exercised his skills across genres. He helmed melodramas, adventure films, Noirs, comedies, romances, musicals, mysteries, horror pictures, histories, war films, literary movies, westerns, and whatever else there is. This put

The third of the Big Three icons of classic horror (Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Jr.), Chaney may have come on the scene last, but he was born for it. Lon Chaney Sr. had been the lone icon of silent horror and Creighton Chaney spent much of his career chasing his father’s star, though

To mark the recent release of The Killing Joke, and the soon-to-be release of Suicide Squad, I’m going to rank the DC Animated films. But I’m keeping this to a top 13 instead of ranking them all as there’s a large number that come out as equally so-so, and not worth my time to rewatch

I ranked the MCU films, so I thought I’d dig a bit deeper. The quality of the villain can have as much to do with the quality of a film as the quality of the hero. Die Hard is often cited as an example of when a great villain makes a great movie. But for

If I’m doing a list for William Powell, then I should do one for Loy, and even more so as this is an easy list to make—it has a great deal of overlap with my Powell list (I’ll even keep some of the brief descriptions). Loy was as Northern European as they come, but her

Ranking the Star Wars films gives me a chance to rate them without writing full reviews. I’ve always wanted them listed on my site—to show where they fit with other F&SF films, but thought it was a bit silly to fully review the first six. The overlap between “People who do not already have a

Sometimes greatness comes from complicated technique, superior skill, and slow, methodical work. Sometimes it’s knowing when to get out of the way and just get things done. Van Dyke was in the second category. Nicknamed “One-take Woody,” Van Dyke was know for his quick work and keeping under budget. The studio loved him for his

(Opening to Friday night’s Creature Features, where I originally saw all of the classic Universal monsters) The one problem with making a Classic Horror list is that so much of it will be obvious. Half of my choices will be on any top 10 list and most will be on all. But Classic Horror contains