Michael Douglas produced One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which won Best Picture, before establishing himself as an actor, and the producing instinct never left him.
The persona that emerged is a professional man whose confidence is exposed as fragility. Wall Street won him Best Actor as Gordon Gekko, a character intended as a warning and adopted as a role model by the industry it satirised.
Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, Falling Down and Disclosure make a run of films about male grievance that were enormous at the time and are now studied as a document of the period.
Wonder Boys is the best late performance and the least seen, and the Ant-Man films gave him a comfortable elder statesman register.
Benicio del ToroTraffic (2000) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Soderbergh shot three parallel drug war narratives himself, gave each one a different film stock, and won Best Director while the film lost Best Picture to Gladiator. Benicio del…
Jack LemmonJames Bridges' 1979 nuclear plant near-meltdown. Released twelve days before Three Mile Island.
Elizabeth AshleyMichael Crichton's 1978 medical thriller. Genevieve Bujold investigates hospital coma conspiracy.
Barbara HersheySchumacher's 1993 urban thriller. Michael Douglas walks across LA leaving violence behind, Robert Duvall follows.
Deborah Kara UngerDavid Fincher's 1997 psychological thriller. Michael Douglas as a wealthy banker experiencing immersive CRS service.
George DzundzaPaul Verhoeven's foundational erotic thriller. Sharon Stone's career-defining performance.
Evangeline LillyEvangeline Lilly's Wasp introduction through earned narrative foundation. Ghost's underdeveloped sympathetic antagonist.
Bobby CannavalePaul Rudd's likability anchors a heist-comedy that survived Edgar Wright's departure. The Quantum World setup that would matter.
Bill MurrayJonathan Majors's Kang, MODOK's design disaster, and the Phase Five opener that confirmed the collapse extended into the new phase. The -100 reflects honest evaluation of one of the worst major studio releases of the past decade and the entry…
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