Jon Lewis

Upon its release, John McTiernan’s Die Hard (1988) was met with immense commercial and critical success; breaking the $100 million mark at the box office in its first run, and resulting in four Academy Award nominations. Jon Lewis’s study of the action classic closely examines the film's novel and script adaptation, highlighting the influential role of producer Joel Silver. He...

Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972) marked a transition in American film-making, and its success—as a work of art, as a creative 'property' exploited by its studio, Paramount Pictures, and as a model for aspiring auteurist film-makers—changed Hollywood forever. Jon Lewis's study of The Godfather begins with a close look at the film's audacious visual style, including the long, theatrical...

The tragic and mysterious circumstances surrounding the deaths of Elizabeth Short, or the Black Dahlia, and Marilyn Monroe ripped open Hollywood’s glitzy façade, exposing the city's ugly underbelly of corruption, crime, and murder. These two spectacular dead bodies, one found dumped and posed in a vacant lot in January 1947, the other found dead in her home in August 1962,...

Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, Part II (1974) is a magisterial cinematic work, a gorgeous, stylised, auteur epic, and one of the few sequels judged by many to be greater than its predecessor. This is despite the fact that it consists largely of meetings between aspiring 'Godfather' Michael Corleone and fellow gangsters, politicians, and family members. The meetings remind us...