April Wolfe

When commercials for Mel Brooks’ Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995) ran on Channel One at my high school, I was ready. Vampire movies had dominated the late ’80s and early ’90s, and at last a slapstick comedy was set to lampoon all that arty melodrama. High school me couldn't......

There’s something satisfying about hearing Tyler Perry, as mad scientist Baxter Stockman, say the words “Eliminate those turtles,” but it’s not quite novel enough to bring Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows up to street level and out of the sewers. Early on, giant squid-like brain Krang (Brad......

Producer Stephanie Allain takes chances. As a young story analyst reading scripts for Columbia Pictures, she took the opportunity to use her position to advocate for the movies she wanted to see made. And as one of only two African-American readers at the company, she was drawn to projects others......

“Did I want to shoot comedies?” asks Brandon Trost, director of photography on two of this summer's funniest films, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping and Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising. “It’s funny — not at all.” But then came MacGruber, Jorma Taccone's 2010 SNL film.“The director wanted me because I wasn’t......

“All of my footage I memorized because I lived it and shot it, so it was my journal in a way,” says Will Allen, director of his strange but true documentary of a small cult formed in the ’80s, of which Allen was a key member. “I was only able......

"No Wall Street movie has ever had a bad box office," Sarah Megan Thomas, the producer and star of indie thriller Equity, says. "If we do a good job, it means we make money." Thomas did the profit-margin research. She and her producing partner and co-star Alysia Reiner (Orange Is......

It's an elitist notion that you can see the next big films only by leaving Los Angeles for Toronto, France or New York. While other fests are frantically loading their schedules with women and people of color (so they can sport an #OscarsSoWhite hashtag without looking hypocritical), L.A. Film Festival......

The guiding principle of Lewis Carroll’s classics Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass is that logic does not exist. You tumble down rabbit holes and into mirrors willy-nilly, and you try to survive, feeling what you feel, having fun when you can — oh, and try not to drown......

Postpartum OCD is a real-life condition worthy of horror films. New moms fight off intrusive thoughts about someone killing or stealing their baby — or killing their baby themselves — and it’s surprisingly common. Since some of the best genre films play off of our ingrained paranoia, writer-director David Farr......

In Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising, the sequel to 2014’s old people–vs.–frat brothers comedy, Zac Efron takes off his shirt in nearly every scene he’s in. It’s a sight to behold — again and again and again — but a calculated effort, like most of this film, to appeal to the......