"158"

I have an ongoing love affair with New York, the city that formed me. I was born here, and though I’ve left occasionally, it was never for very long. The pace, color, and excitement of this amazing town always drew me back like a magnet, and holds me still. No surprise then that I love experiencing the potent nostalgia of great films that recall the New York City of my early years.

I will always remember the pure exhilaration I felt watching Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” for the first time in a theater thirty years ago. The memory is so clear of first realizing that I was experiencing an extraordinary piece of filmmaking, deliriously entertaining but also completely fresh and unique. What made “Pulp” so exciting and distinctive?

Top-ten lists of holiday films abound right about now, but what about picking the top three Christmas movies ever made? Certainly there's plenty to choose from. Christmas movies are almost a genre unto themselves: between live-action and animated features, there are literally hundreds of titles out there. Inevitably, some are pretty bad, others amusingly cheesy.

James Brown, the "Godfather of Soul," will finally get his due in director Tate Taylor’s "Get On Up," out this week some 12 years after Brian Grazer (who co-produced it with Mick Jagger) first tried to get the project off the ground.   Early reviews champion star Chadwick Boseman’s kinetic performance as "The Hardest Working Man in Show Business." Congrats, Chadwick: those are very big (and very active) shoes to fill. This is just the latest addition to a treasure trove of music biopics that have made some serious box office noise over the decades. Below are ten that deserve a debut or encore performance on your home screen. Pick one, and give your eyes and ears a treat.  

Man versus Nature. It’s a struggle as old as the movies—even as old as man himself. (Man, that’s old.) Many movies have thrilled us by pitting their leading characters against the elements. Floods, blizzards, tornados, tsunamis and other cases of severe and, at times, catastrophic weather conditions are the stuff film drama is made of.  It seems that hardly a calendar year goes by without stormy weather whipping around audiences. Earlier his year, Russell Crowe’s “Noah” encountered a flood of Biblical proportions. And just when we thought the memory of Hurricane Sandy was starting to fade, “Into the Storm” arrives in theaters shortly, bringing destructive cyclones and tornadoes with it.

The phenomenon known as typecasting has been practiced in Hollywood since its earliest days. Stars who excelled in certain kinds of roles were usually offered those kinds of parts repeatedly. To risk-averse studios, this simply made good business sense.

One of my favorite “insider” books about the film business is 1983’s “Adventures In The Screen Trade,”  an often lacerating, highly insightful expose about the inner workings of Hollywood. Its author is veteran screenwriter William Goldman, who scripted numerous high profile movies in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s.