The Towering Inferno, Irwin Allen’s 1974 disaster epic, is utterly charmless, totally without wit, but in its finale it gives us a tableau from Dante - the venal and stupid plutocrats trapped in the tower will be redeemed by flood, saved from the fire, returned to earth by the movie’s twinned heroes, Steve McQueen and Paul Newman. More in GROSS, the Hollywood history newsletter: https://bit.ly/4oGIgI9

The Exorcist isn’t a horror movie, it’s a strident Catholic evangelical text. And from the present moment, a moment in which an aggressive and confident new Catholic fundamentalism has made its home at the top of the Silicon Valley elite and even in The White House, it begins to look scarily prescient. More of this at http://GROSS.ly

It’s almost 90 years old, it’s cheesy and it’s a travesty of English history but it became the model for every action movie that followed. The Adventures of Robin Hood was 1938’s top-grossing movie… http://bit.ly/3Lsn62Q

Eddington is Ari Aster's dark COVID Western: its culture war themes are becoming more relevant daily. Tomorrow, on the GROSS Substack, I'll be discussing the movie with influential University of California film studies Prof Catherine Liu at 11am PDT/7pm UK. Free and open to all: https://open.substack.com/live-stream/59509

🚀 What will it be like to work in space? What will be expected of the workers who go there? https://bit.ly/4n5YslX

There's a dry cleaners in Kilburn that's turning into a bike shop… https://bit.ly/44UJeu3

The Brutalist: Holocaust as plot twist. My thesis - of which I'll admit I am uncertain - is that the final scene of The Brutalist drops some important information that utterly alters our sense of the whole movie, rippling back through the narrative, turning the screenplay itself into an unreliable narrator. It’s upsetting and kind of mind-bending… https://bit.ly/42swiZV