Allan Stratton

Author Archive

  • October 25, 2024
    Note: The following essay contains spoilers. On 22 December 1984, four teenagers, all of whom had previously been arrested, boarded a New York subway train with the intention of...
  • September 3, 2024
    It’s hard for a novelist to make a double axe-murderer sympathetic, especially when his victims are an old woman and her mentally disabled half-sister. In addition to which,...
  • June 6, 2024
    The Mad Max franchise is one of the more improbable successes in Hollywood history. It began in 1979 as an original, one-off, low-budget exploitation flick written,...
  • April 19, 2024
    In Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 classic Apocalypse Now, a US patrol boat heads upriver during the Vietnam War to assassinate Colonel Kurtz, a rogue commander whose...
  • February 19, 2024
    The Oscars have never been about art. As Louis B. Mayer once remarked, recalling the creation of his brainchild, “I found that the best way to handle [moviemakers] was to...