Christopher Symonds

It seems that Marvel Studios can do no wrong, doesn’t it? I mean they bravely come out swinging a few years ago with a roster of characters that the average movie goer doesn’t know, and interweave a m...
The 80s were certainly the era for sequels galore and drew a road map for how Hollywood would produce movies into the future. The franchises spawned, by and large, in that era still exist today. One o...
‘Top’ lists are an unending phenomenon that spawn articles in magazines, books, TV shows, fan sites, and, in the world of movies, unending discussion/debate on which ones make the cut. As a young movi...
1984 was quite the year for movies. Goonies, Gremlins, Splash, Police Academy, The Karate Kid, Indiana Jones and Temple of Doom, Footloose, Beverly Hills Cop, and the third Star Trek all hit cinemas t...
That one sentence often accompanies many reviews, lists, and assessments about Darryl F. Zanuck’s 1962 epic, honouring of D-Day. Before it had even rolled a frame of film, this film was in trouble. 20...
Alfred Hitchcock has many classics under his none-too-skinny belt, but arguably none are as universally beloved as the 1954 thriller Rear Window. Based on the short story by writer Cornell Woolrich ca...
In 1922 a naughty fledgling German production company stole the story of Dracula by Bram Stoker and made one of cinema’s most revered horror movies: Nosferatu. Prana Film went bankrupt with their firs...
The story of the 47 Ronin is by all accounts the most famous story of samurai in the history of Japan. Many plays, books, films have apparently been dedicated to the true story of 47 samurai who would...
Bryan Singer made quite the name for himself back in 2000 when he released the first X-Men movie. Leaving them behind to have a go at resurrecting Superman, it was left to directors Brett Ratner and M...
It is an ever growing cynical world we live in today, and even the best of us, with the pace of life, sometime forget to look at those around us. In those forgotten there are the meek, the quiet, the...
Infamy has always followed the early 70s pornographic film Deep Throat. It is arguably the most famous and certainly most successful financially (earning over 600 million dollars) of pornos, even 40 y...
‘She was a chunky girl with pimples on her neck and back and buttocks, her wet hair completely without color.' -Stephen King The story that gave Stephen King to the world has been adapted as a cinemat...
After the epidemic of remakes, reboots (or as the cynic might say, ‘we’ve milked this cow in its current incarnation as much as we can, so here’s a new version!), there is something truly ‘amazing’ in...
As a lifelong DC comic reader, it was merely an ancillary knowledge of Marvel characters I was aware of. But Thor I was familiar with, and in a cinematic world damn curious as to how to make a blonde-...
There are plenty of examples in film history of now revered classics not finding their audience upon first release. With so many ‘top’ lists having Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo in them, and the reverenc...