Tod Browning

BASIC CABLE "E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL" **** 6:30 p.m., Family Channel "Phone home!" Steven Spielberg's 1982 sci-fi fantasy remains one of the most beloved films of modern times, with the bug-eyed title alien character and his 7-year-old co-star, Drew...

Each year there are dozens of movies that disappear from theaters nearly as quickly as they arrive. Of those, only a lucky few gain new life at midnight screenings and on video as cult films. Joel and Ethan Coen, the duo behind the Oscar best picture "No...

As the first of a trio of his movies the Nuart is presenting over the next several days, Alejandro Jodorowsky's "El Topo" seems just as pretentious and shallow as it did more than 35 years ago, but, then as now, it is understandable why it caught on as...

Tattooed rock musicians, exploitation flicks, '90s animation - what's next, commercials? You'll have to forgive Turner Classic Movies junkies who fear for their beloved haven of uncut, uninterrupted, vintage Hollywood treasures. They saw what happened to...

Once more into the 'Dracula' breach for Universal. The studio has decided that it's just been too darned long since viewers got to see an origin story for the world's most famous vampire. Thus, writers Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless have been recruited...

The older Bernardo Bertolucci gets, the more you have to share his heedless love of youth for youth's sake to be enthusiastic about his films. If you don't glow with the same pleasure he feels when the characters in "The Dreamers" alternate brashness with...

Chicago is having a veritable Philip Glass festival this season, with his operas "In the Penal Colony" opening next month at the Court Theatre and "The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five" due at the DePaul University Opera Theater in June. And...

In "The Intended," Brenda Fricker displays a saving dark humor as a tough ivory trader at a station in a Southeast Asian jungle in 1924. She is a sturdy widow who has taken over for her late husband with a firm hand. A greedy survivor, she maintains an...

Straight out of Canada by way of Transylvania, "Dracula — Pages From a Virgin's Diary" ranks among the more eccentric wonders of the new-movie world. A wittily revisionist adaptation of the Bram Stoker classic and a passionate kiss to a lost...

3 stars (out of 4) "Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary" is yet another vampire film, one more revival of Bram Stoker's evil and insatiable count. But this time, it's one that may surprise you. Stoker's oft-filmed legend of the bloodthirsty undead is...

SHORTLY AFTER James Whale's "Frankenstein” opened in November 1931, the manager of a certain Granada Theater received a 2 a.m. wake-up call. "I can't sleep,” said the unhappy patron. "So I'll be darned if you're going to sleep either!” The anecdote,...

Friday October 17, 1997      Snapshots: A rough tryst in an old wrecked car. A dead cat who "looks like my mom." Young girls practicing to be strippers. A bare-chested kid wearing pink rabbit ears. A dog impaled on a rooftop antenna.      This is the...