Universal Michael Cimino’s “The Deer Hunter” is a scalding experience. Over three hours, we get to know a group of Western Pennsylvania steelworkers who are plucked from their blue-collar town and thrust into the confounding hell of the Vietnam War. These are not complicated men. Left to their own devices, …

Warner Bros. Francis Ford Coppola’s miraculous 1970s run of “The Godfather,” “The Conversation,” “The Godfather Part II” and “Apocalypse Now” came crashing to a hubristic halt in 1982 when his backlot musical “One from the Heart,” produced at his recently purchased Zoetrope Studios in the heart of Hollywood, bombed upon …

Columbia Pictures There’s an assumption, especially nowadays in the post-Judd Apatow filmmaking era, that comedies are great big improv fests. A finished script is nice and all, but when you put a bunch of funny people together, you’d be loath not to let them riff up a storm; give yourself …

CBS Norman Lear, who recently passed away at the age of 101, transformed the network television sitcom in the 1970s by confronting America’s cultural contentiousness head-on and daring viewers to laugh at a bigot like Archie Bunker on “All in the Family” or the white-folks-hating George Jefferson on “The Jeffersons.” …

Laurie Sparham/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures The 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, Germany were about more than sports. The world was still mired in the Great Depression, and faced the prospect of a second world war as fascism flourished throughout Europe. As such, there couldn’t have been a worse time for Berlin to …

Universal John Carpenter’s “Halloween” is one of the finest horror films ever made. Rick Rosenthal’s “Halloween II” is one or 12 steps down from that. Carpenter’s original is also one of the most successful independent productions of all time. It launched the slasher film craze, made Jamie Lee Curtis a …

20th Century Fox It’s been 46 years since George Lucas injected the “Star Wars” virus into the pop cultural bloodstream, and, for those who weren’t there from the start, I often wonder if they fully understand why the first film captured moviegoers’ imaginations and changed the medium forever. Though “Star …

Paramount Michael Bay was a decade into his film directing career when Steven Spielberg and “Transformers” beckoned. He’d established himself as a maestro of mayhem — or, as we call it now, “Bayhem.” He made the $19 million budgeted “Bad Boys” look like a $75 million action extravaganza, and the $75 …

20th Century Fox In the 1980s and ’90s, it wasn’t uncommon for studios to mine pre-existing spec screenplays for sequel premises. While developing “Die Hard with a Vengeance,” 20th Century Fox kicked the tires on a script called “Troubleshooter,” which would’ve plopped bad-luck magnet John McClane on a terrorist-packed cruise …

Lucasfilm This post contains spoilers for “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.” For the last two years, James Mangold has been living the fanboy dream. 40 years after the premiere of “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” the director of “Copland” and “Logan,” who was 18 when the film hit …

Marvel Studios The Marvel Cinematic Universe has hit some box-office and off-screen road bumps over the last year, but the brand keeps on expanding as the company builds to its next mega-blockbuster in 2024’s “Captain America: Brave New World.” Whereas Phase 4 was plagued by too much narrative wheel-spinning, Phase …

Sony Pictures Entertainment Early in Quentin Tarantino’s career (i.e. after the watershed success of “Pulp Fiction”), the boundlessly energetic filmmaker basically embarked on a second career as a talk show guest. He’d turn up on shows even if he didn’t have anything to promote because he tended to be great …