Played by Orson Welles at his charismatic best, cinema’s most memorable black marketeer manages to charm nearly everyone he...

When I first learned that a significant number of Shakespeare scholars consider Iago–slimy, scheming, irredeemably evil Iago–the...

Of all the henchmen and hired killers buried by suave super-spy James Bond, few are more gleefully sadistic and psychotic than Mister...

In terms of storytelling, what really defines a character as a villain? His actions? Well, consider Putnam, who spends the entirety of...

In the process of developing a personality for the charismatic killer in Quentin Tarantino’s throwback to ‘70s low-budget cinema, Kurt...

4. Suganoichi, Blind Menace: Unlike Zatoichi, Shintaro Katsu’s more famous blind masseur, Suganoichi is rotten to the core. As a boy, he...

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder if Orion. I’ve watched c-beams glitter in the dark...

A good action scene does not exist for its own sake; rather, it is the culmination of the screenwriter’s meticulously-laid groundwork....

By the end of The Walking Dead’s seventh season premiere, Rick Grimes is a broken man. And it’s his own damn fault. And as I watched the...

From the opening frame to the end credits, a cloud of impending doom hovers over Fruitvale Station—not only because the visual language...

The remake of Red Dawn truly is a war movie for the Call of Duty generation, too preoccupied with the spectacle of bloodshed to...

Man, woman; white, black, Filipino; farmer, college boy–under the leadership of Earth’s “Federation,” all are finally equal....

It ends with a tight close-up on the sweat-drenched face of fencing instructor Araki Mataemon (Toshiro Mifune, a far more versatile...

On the morning of April 20, 1999, teenagers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold armed themselves with semi-automatic handguns and improvised...

In the Coen Brothers’ adaptation of True Grit, corpses litter the (rapidly declining) Old West. They swing from nooses, decay in coffins,...

Ever since Edwin S. Porter had his great train robber fire directly at the camera, the landscape of cinema has been drenched in blood....

You can feel them. Frigid as a bucket of ice water poured straight down your back. Eyes. The eyes of a stranger. Stalking you through the...

A pair of wounded samurai wade through a dense, endless sea of tall grass, leaning on one other for support. Every line on their...

A mother looks from the ticking clock on the mantel to the empty chair at the dinner table. She leans out the window and calls her...

Few cinematic serial killers ooze calculated creepiness quite like Sir Anthony Hopkins’ “Hannibal the Cannibal.” From the slurping to the...