Martin has an odd relationship to his genre. We begin with a raid north of the Wall where our rangers are killed by zombies, who are pret...

“Holes” uses a classic trick: it establishes the two worst things that could happen, then those things of course happen. First, after the...

What a wonderful film.  Our top two movies are so similar: Both were created by performers who weren’t known as writers or directors but bo...

Two thoughts on this movie: A new tool: The fake-out redemption scene. This movie has a scene in it that’s very similar to a scene in my...

Despite the undeniable raw power of this movie, I was somewhat reluctant to have it on the list, because, as I’ve talked about in past yea...

This section got completely cut from the book at one point, then put back in at half its original length, so there’s lots of good stuff he...

I saw a lot of bad indie movies back in the day, but surely one of the most annoying was Blue Car . The main storyline involved a girl ha...

This is possibly the number one mistake I see in the manuscripts I read. You’re written forty pages of great relationship drama and you ...

The Problem: None! For those of you who haven’t seen it: Annette Benning plays a single mom in 1979 with two boarders in her rotting C...

The Problem: None! Now that we’re in the top three, we’re down to movies that I unreservedly loved. Warning: I know that not many of ...

What I Liked About It: You won’t find a more intense emotional journey than this movie (although our next movie is a close second). Bette...

Once again, I’ll start with what didn’t work: The Problem: Most of the conflict in this movie is false conflict. We start with a very f...

So here I am back. I’m so sorry to disappear for so long, but it’s just hard to care about anything in the middle of this national nightm...

Is “Stranger Things” a series or a miniseries? In many ways, this feels more like the first hour of a miniseries than the first hour of a...

Whoops, here’s one last post based on a comment on last week’s posts. Longtime commenter Harvey Jerkwater did something rather embarrassi...

Wes Anderson is one of those directors who defines “love him or hate him”…but really it’s both: many people who hate him will admit that t...

As I established before, establishing and maintaining your tone isn’t just a matter of letting the audience know that this will be light o...

As I wrote the preceding series, I kept circling around a definition that I never really nailed down: What is the “dramatic question”?   ...

We’ve talked about several forms of foreshadowing already, from obvious methods like using a framing sequence, flashforward, or voiceover t...

Once you create an expectation that something will happen, the audience will get more and more anxious until it occurs. This is how you w...