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The 2014 Oscar nominations are just out, and once again, this year’s Best Picture nominees demonstrate the connections that great movies have to each other. To illustrate, here’s a list of the current nominees matched with previous winners that share some common themes.

Eventually, there comes a point in the holiday festivities when the guys need to get away from the tinsel, lights, and pastries on doilies. Sometimes, they just need to crack open a beer and crowd around a high-testosterone movie. This list of manly titles cuts to the chase.

I’ll admit it: I’m old enough to remember when the late Walter Cronkite delivered America its news every night at 7PM (if you were on the East Coast). I always loved him, and more important, I always believed him.

The late Deborah Kerr always represented a rare breed of movie actress: a lady first and foremost, who, even when playing women of dubious virtue, exuded an innate sense of class- even nobility.

A while back, we did a piece isolating some of the best, most biting dialogue from the world of film noir, that dark, often hidden underbelly of society portrayed in movies from the forties and fifties where no one can be trusted and everyone talks wise.

On this Labor Day weekend back in 1982, a significant event took place that was little noted at the time: a movie opened called “Fast Times At Ridgemont High.” In fact, so little was expected of this modest high school comedy that Universal Pictures almost opted not to release it on the East Coast.

“Dying is easy, comedy-that’s hard.”

I’ve always loved Italy and most all things Italian: the country, the language, the food, and most of all, the people.  I’ve always perceived the Italian national character as refreshingly open, romantic and passionate, with all human contradictions and frailties laid right out in the open. To me the Italians seem fabulously, enviably, alive.

The movies go where we can’t, which makes them particularly suited for stories of discovery. But first, there is a search, which is pure adventure. Setting out to solve a mystery, or simply to see for oneself what lies beyond, is always the stuff of great entertainment. Whether one seeks or finds, the thirst for knowledge is the key driver of the human story.