For two decades, Heat has stood as the high-water mark of action epics, aped by numerous filmmakers. (Just try and imagine Christopher Nolan’s career without it.) But as much as the film gets credit for its massive scale and its impressive balance of its ensemble cast, the X factor that makes it such an enduring work is Michael Mann’s gift …

It is easy to blame novelist Anne Rice for having paved the road for weirdly moralistic, mopey vampires (and also inadvertently causing Fifty Shades of Grey) to exist in our culture. Her 1977 novel, Interview with the Vampire, is Patient Zero for the cultural sea change that has morphed vampires from figures of fear into objects of adoration. To be …

On June 17, 1994, television news cameras were fixated on the 405 freeway in Los Angeles. Live broadcasts that evening showed the LAPD chasing a white Ford Bronco. The image of O.J. Simpson on the slow lam was a prescient foreshadowing of today’s round the clock news cycle. It happened on a Friday night, when summer entertainment typically meant a …

My older brother deserves all the credit for introducing me to Asian cinema. Sure, I had seen some random kung fu movies, but I had never been exposed to contemporary Asian cinema before. And it all started with Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express. The video store (yes, this was back when those existed) had a copy, and he decided to rent …

American Recordings seemingly came out of nowhere in 1994. It didn’t, of course, but it felt that way, partly because Johnny Cash’s well-honed image as the Man in Black hadn’t changed in the public’s eye since around 1968. More so it was because his output in the 1980s/early 1990s had also been largely inessential, to put it mildly, consisting mostly …

Now 20 years and just over three months removed from the original release of The Downward Spiral it is questionable who has held up better: the industrial rock masterpiece or the man behind the electronic chaos. Although Trent Reznor might never have envisioned making it out of the 1990s, there was a passion for this record to last far longer …

Pavement was one of those bands whose influences were totally audible, but who blasted out a sonic path in a voice that was all their own. The Fall was the obvious reference for the early records, and you can hear them go through Wire and the Byrds and even turn into Stereolab for about 30 seconds on the great Wowee …

In the summer of 1994, Forrest Gump, Speed and the Lion King were topping the box office. OJ Simpson was arrested for suspicion of murder. Nelson Mandela went from being a prisoner to president, marking the end of apartheid. Green Day sparked a so-called “punk rock” revolution, which paved the way for pop-punk success years later. And the second Woodstock …

A look back at Nirvana's MTV Unplugged

In 1993, metal and hardcore bands endured the wandering eyes of the fans. There were notably few metal-oriented heavy music releases that year. Grunge was breaking, and the adolescent masses were increasingly being captivated by the loose, do-it-yourself ethos found in the hybrid punk and garage rock. Experiments proliferated from the rapidly growing popularity of Rage Against the Machine’s activist …