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With Halloween approaching, thoughts turn to that prized commodity in our popular culture: the horror movie. It’s been with us since the silent days (“Nosferatu,” anyone?), and it’s one of the few genres Hollywood feels comfortable taking a risk on anymore. Horror has a built-in fan base, skewing younger and male, but also with loyal […]

Like me, Frances McDormand is not a big fan of the Academy Awards. As she put it in her characteristically wry, plainspoken way: “I don't like award shows. At our house we call this time of year 'the convention'. It's too bad we haven't figured out how to stop it. But I think…because of the Internet… it will naturally go away. We'll have other ways to gather; it's not going to be this stuff. The shoes hurt too much.”

“There's a lot to be said for making people laugh. Did you know that that's all some people have? It isn't much, but it's better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan.”

Going crazy in real life is about as glamorous as sleeping in a bowling alley, but going crazy on-screen? Plan your Oscar outfit early. There is scenery to be chewed, fits to be pitched on an epic scale, fantasies to spin, and a kind of canny brilliance to the crazy character’s lunacy.       Maybe we are drawn to movie crazies as a kind of proxy nervous breakdown, the one we’d like to have, if only we could spare the time. In the more extreme cases, such as director Alfred Hitchcock’s criminally insane killers in “Psycho” (1960) and “Frenzy” (1972), we are watching a bomb blast from a safe distance, marveling at the potential for distortion within the human mind. And then there are characters that are driven crazy, like Ophelia (Jean Simmons) in “Hamlet” (1948), or Jasmine (Cate Blanchett), the shattered widow of an unscrupulous New York financier, in “Blue Jasmine” (2013).

From the socially unacceptable, to the downright deviant, taboo topics make for dramatic movies. What we can’t, and wouldn’t, do in life, film plays out for us, revealing not only the forbidden acts, but also the hidden motivations behind them.

 One of the major pleasures and sources of eye candy the movies provide are fantasy spaces of which dreams are made. For anyone who lives for their monthly issue of Dwell, or who forwards photo compilations of delicious décor, on-screen interiors offer a form of fun several notches up from catalogue shopping.  Whether these movies were shot on sound stages, or on existing locations dressed up for their close-up, they perform the task of drawing us into the world of the story, and making us forget about the tedious limitations of reality. If you could choose any movie interior to move into, which one would it be? 

Submarines perform wonderfully as containers for high-tension drama as the challenges of close quarters, the inability to see what’s going on above, and the vulnerability of sailors working at many fathoms beneath the sea become as compressed as the oxygen they breathe.

We don’t usually think of them this way, but movies are made in pieces. Little bits of footage are cut and assembled into something that hangs together, and ideally, makes sense. Editing is a complicated, delicate skill, practiced by professionals who’ve spent years refining their craft.