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How science fiction films in the 1950s were marketed and helped create the broader genre itself. For Hollywood, the golden age of science fiction was also an age of anxiety. Amid rising competition, fluid audience habits, and increasing government regulation, studios of the 1950s struggled to make and sell the kinds of films that once were surefire winners. These conditions, the leading media scholar J. P. Telotte argues, catalyzed the incredible rise of science fiction. Though science fiction films had existed since the earliest days of cinema, the SF genre as a whole continued to resist easy definition through the 1950s. In grappling with this developing genre, the industry began to consider new marketing approaches that viewed films as fluid texts and audiences as ever-changing. Drawing on trade reports, film reviews, pressbooks, trailers, and other archival materials, Selling Science Fiction Cinema reconstructs studio efforts to market a promising new genre and, in the process, shows how salesmanship influenced what that genre would become. Telotte uses such films as The Thing from Another World , Forbidden Planet , and The Blob , as well as the influx of Japanese monster movies, to explore the shifting ways in which the industry reframed the SF genre to market to no-longer static audience expectations. Science fiction transformed the way Hollywood does business, just as Hollywood transformed the meaning of science fiction.

The name of Hungarian animation film maker George Pal (1908-1980) is almost unknown, both in his home country Hungary and in the Netherlands. His 110th birthday anniversary passed without any commemoration in spite of the fact that he was a key figure in the Dutch animation film history. In this article I would like to demonstrate why we should see Pal as the founder of the Dutch industrial animation production and which role he has in the research on the cultural relations between the Netherlands and Hungary in the period before the World War II. His influence on the Dutch animation film industry has been hardly analyzed until now. On the base of source research, which adds to the incomplete publications, I would like to prove why the invitation of Pal to the Netherlands in July 1934 had a fundamental influence on the Dutch animation production. Later on, this research will be the beginning of a thorough study of the importance and the network of George Pal in the Netherlands.

Eagle-Lion, an independent film producer and distributor from 1946 to 1951, attempted to compete with the major Hollywood studios by releasing inexpensive films known as programmers that had a unique marketing angle. One of the most successful of these was Destination Moon (1950), which initiated the 1950s boom in science-fiction cinema. The film's semidocumentary mode was intended to broaden its appeal by differentiating it from more juvenile and fantastic examples of the genre. Despite Destination Moon's strong performance, Eagle-Lion was unable to achieve sustained success, due in part to the major studios' continued control of distribution and exhibition.

Bradbury’s 1999 induction into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame opens chapter 36. That year he also received the George Pal Memorial Award from the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Films, followed in 2000 by a National Book Foundation Medal. His November 1999 stroke and subsequent loss of sight in his left eye did not prevent him from attending this ceremony, or from finally gathering his half-century-old stories of the supernatural Elliot family into a novelized story collection, From the Dust Returned. The chapter closes with Bradbury’s cautions against the loss of freedom of the imagination; these thoughts had resurfaced in his new book’s inter-chapter bridges and in his letter to Leon Uris reflecting on the mid-century climate of fear.

One of the late Heath Ledger's finest hours: a haunting, beautiful adaptation of E Annie Proulx's short story centring on how the mutual passion of young cowboys Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in 1960s Wyoming ruins their lives. Ledger's performance is intensely moving in a quiet, subtly told tale that achieves a real sense of tragedy. [John Schlesinger] seems much at home with this Thomas Hardy tale of Wessex folk, and his direction is enhanced by Nicolas Roeg's seductive camerawork and Frederic Raphael's script. Julie Christie, the archetypal 1960s modern miss, is a little out of place in period costume, her ambitious Bathsheba torn between dashing Terence Stamp, wealthy Peter Finch and poor Alan Bates's rude rustic.

Next time you're stuck in an airport waiting for a delayed flight, spare a thought for Tom Hanks' Viktor Navorski, who spends 11 years in the departure lounge of JFK after being stranded by a coup in his home country. Based on the true story of an Iranian at Charles de Gaulle airport, it's an absorbing rather than enthralling account of the little guy's battle against an uncaring bureaucracy - plus an unlikely romance with air stewardess Catherine Zeta-Jones. Sean Penn is a tough street kid in a small Pennsylvanian town, fiercely protective of his little brother (Chris Penn) and in love with soppy Mary Stuart Masterson. Then along comes long-lost Dad, and as soon as we see it's cold-eyed Christopher Walken, we know there's going to be trouble. A brooding, hard-boiled tale, let down somewhat by [James Foley]'s clunking direction.

This cheerfully gory horror pits a bunch of teens against the ultimate serial slasher: the grim reaper himself. Devon Sawa plays 17-year-old Alex, who along with his high school chums misses the flight to Paris.