At the time of its release, James Cameron's Titanic was the most expensive film production ever mounted, and widely expected to be a critical and commercial failure. Negative rumors about the film began to swirl after the film's production, which...

Reasons of State is a fictional political novel written by Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier, and published in 1975. The novel is a very important piece of Latin American literature, as it captures the events of the times, which were mostly of...

Le Père Goriot, translated literally in English as “The Father Goriot,” is a novel by Honoré de Balzac. As a Realist writer, Balzac strove to present people and events exactly as they were, without idealizing or romanticizing people. His work,...

Imagine trying to cope with the changes both within yourself and in the world around you as you are turning eight years old; then imagine trying to cope when the older brother you look up to and depend on has an accident that forever changes his...

Slumdog Millionaire is a British film from 2008, which premiered at the Telluride Film Festival and was one of the biggest hits of 2008. It won eight Academy Awards in total, including Best Picture and Best Director. Its Oscar-winning screenplay...

First published in 1928 in the pulp magazine Weird Tales, "The Call of Cthulhu" is a short story by American author H.P. Lovecraft, an early twentieth-century short-story writer famous for his works of horror and science fiction. Farnsworth...

Parramatta Girls is playwright Alana Valentine's dramatization of the testimony of the girls imprisoned at the Girls Training School in Parramatta. The play frames the story as a reunion between eight of the inmates of the "school" nearly 40 years...

Good Night, Mr. Tom is a children's book published in 1981, written by English actress, dancer, and writer Michelle Magorian. Magorian had a strong passion for the history of children's literature which inspired her to try her hand at writing....

Broken Arrow is director Delmer Daves' 1950 film starring James Stewart as Tom Jeffords, Jeff Chandler as Cochise, and Debra Paget as Sonseeahray. The film follows Stewart's Jeffords as he tries to make peace between Apache Indians and settlers in...

Boyz n the Hood is Writer/Director John Singleton's debut effort. It was released in 1991 and stars Cuba Gooding Jr. as Tre Styles, Angela Bassett as Reva Styles, Laurence Fishburne as Jason Styles Jr., and Ice Cube as Darrin Baker. The movie...

In the early 1970s, an ethnic sub-genre of movies emerged known as "Blaxploitation". The films featured largely stereotypical black characters, and for this reason received considerable backlash, but despite this, Blaxploitation movies were the...

Maurice is a novel about homosexuality written by E. M. Forster. It was first published after several years of revision and work in 1971, a year after the death of its author. The book was initially written between the years 1913 and 1914, revised...

German film director Fritz Lang was sailing into New York City for the first time in 1924 when he was struck with his initial inspiration for Metropolis. He described his first glimpse of the skyline thus: "I looked into the streets—the glaring...

Little Dorrit is a novel written by Charles Dickens published between 1855 and 1857. The book was published in serial form and was divided into nineteen parts, each sold separately. Each installment was illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne and had...