Dennis Seuling

Boxing movies have the benefit of built-in action sequences along with their dramatic stories. In 1947, Body and Soul established the template for future boxing movies, such as Requiem for a Heavyweight, Rocky, Raging Bull, and Cinderella Man. A young man from modest beginnings, lured into professional boxing by the promise of fame and fortune, finds his morality coming into conflict with his ambition.

Hollywood during its Golden Age turned out many musicals, including some biopics about song writers, such as Night and Day (about Cole Porter), Till the Clouds Roll By (Jerome Kern), Deep in My Heart (Sigmund Romberg), and Three Little Words (Bert Kalmer & Harry Ruby). Usually, their stories were whitewashed to exorcise any unpleasantness or controversy. Words and Music, about Rodgers and Hart, did the same, forgoing an authentic portrayal of its subjects and devoting most of the film to elaborate stagings of their most timeless songs.

Up the Creek is a wannabe National Lampoon’s Animal House, the low-budget film that made a fortune out of fraternity-gone-wild antics, sexual suggestiveness, and an off-the-wall John Belushi. Up the Creek uses the same template of slacker college kids raising a ruckus but takes them off campus for a challenging competition.

The Becomers combines elements of Invasion of the Body Snatchers with indie filmmaking in a sci-fi love story set in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Rob Lowe was already a star, with credits including The Outsiders, The Hotel New Hampshire and St. Elmo’s Fire, when he took on the challenging role of a young hockey prodigy in the 1986 film Youngblood.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings is best known as the author of the 1938 novel The Yearling, which was adapted into a film eight years later. The novel grew out of her experiences during a period in her life that she spent in rural Florida. Her memoirs recounting these experiences form the basis of the motion picture Cross Creek.

Roseland was released the same year as Saturday Night Fever. Both focus on individuals who seek magic in a dance arena. The two films couldn’t be more different from each other. Saturday Night Fever is very much in step with the disco era in which it was released, while Roseland centers on aging people who dwell on the ballroom days of their youth.

Every now and then, a film comes along without fanfare, stars, or media hype, yet turns out to be surprisingly good. Such a film is The Throwback, a low-budget production about family, the challenges of parenthood, and adult obstacles to pursuing one’s youthful dreams.

No Country for Old Men, a Best Picture Oscar winner based on the novel of the same name by Cormac McCarthy and adapted and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, is a harsh look at the inevitability of consequences at a time when the nature of crime has taken a dramatic turn for the worse. Set in west Texas, it’s a gripping variation on the chase film.

Action films made in Europe with American stars to capitalize on big-budget Hollywood pictures were popular during the 1960s at drive-ins and as second features on theater double bills. Battle of the Commandos, an Italian-Spanish-German co-production, stars Jack Palance (Shane) in a low-budget tale of vengeance with plenty of shootings and explosions that give it the look of a much costlier film.