There are certain movies I love that I call Guilty Pleasures—movies that—for whatever reasons—are maligned for their exploitive subject matter, poor productions, or for just being low-brow affairs. But I love them just the same, for any number of reasons. One such guilty pleasure for me is Race with the Devil. I first saw it at a drive-in theatre in 1975, and its cheap B-movie action thrills reached out from the screen, grabbed hold of me, and have never let me go. What’s it

Sidney Poitier was the first Black actor to win the Academy Award for Best Actor. The year was 1964. He won the Oscar for his wonderfully engaging performance in the film Lilies of the Field. Lilies is a small, character-driven comedy-drama about an itinerant handyman named Homer Smith who encounters a group of five Catholic nuns—German nuns who have escaped from behind the Berlin Wall and now live in a remote part of the Arizona desert. Homer stops at their place because his

There was a time when movie theatres were so unlike many of the faceless, homogenous ones that we have today. The theatres of my youth were like churches to me—churches where a special kind of flickering magic happened. Even the modest theatres of the 1950s and 60s were grand, in their way. The bold colors on the lighted marquees. The ornate Art Deco flourishes on the carpets and walls. The movie screens that were hidden behind heavy curtains until it was time for the show to

You know you’re in good hands when a filmmaker takes a calm, everyday setting—maybe even one that evokes a feeling of serenity and beauty, as Hitchcock often did—and suddenly reverses it, turning that calm into a stunning trap from which there is seemingly no escape. That’s exactly the hook of the 1997 movie Breakdown, a terrific Hitchcock-like mystery that turns a road trip full of promise into a nerve-wracking ordeal filled with desperation and terror. Unlike other movies t