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Who are you calling “Diva?”   In real life, wrangling with a diva is a blood-boiling lesson in the perils of the high-maintenance personality. On film, though, there is an undeniable deliciousness to watching the diva — at a safe distance.   Divas are so cutting, so presumptuous, so brash, brassy, demanding, withering, larger than life, full of themselves, and they chew through scenery with cast iron teeth. And, in what might just be a law of nature, it often takes a diva to play a diva. 

There’s an extra frisson of excitement to be found in what I call “launch pad” movies. This is not necessarily a movie star’s first film, but rather the one that propels him or her to that exalted status. In these special outings, you can feel a certain electricity coming off the screen; it's as if the performer is announcing in a subliminal stage whisper: “I’ve arrived!”  Here are twenty key launch pad vehicles for some of my favorite stars, spanning eighty years of movie history.   

They say the customer is always right — but not always right away. For instance, sometimes it takes a while for movie audiences to recognize just how special a film really is. When it premieres, there’s a barely audible thud, and very little box office.  The culprit could be poor distribution, half-hearted promotion, a storyline slightly ahead of its time, the ire of some influential critic with digestive trouble, or any combination of the above. A surprising number of now-classic films either just broke even, or actually lost money on initial release. Here are 10 classics from my list that fall into this category. 

It all started with the hardboiled detective fiction which exploded onto the American popular culture way back in the roaring twenties. This new genre portrayed America’s evolving urban landscape as vividly as the Western genre did the rural frontier.

Film lets us move in with idealized families, the families we would happily join if they were real and would have us. Here, we have gathered our favorites into one warm, harmonious place. We can smell the cookies baking from here…

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.

“Godzilla” is lumbering back out of the deep, spoiling for a fight and hungry for various delicious looking landmarks. Be warned, this relic of Japan’s atomic age nightmares has grown grumpier (and apparently more pot-bellied) in his fifteen years away from the big screen. And he’s definitely still growling from his treatment in Roland Emmerich’s 1998 big-budget disaster starring Matthew Broderick. In this newest iteration of cinema’s favorite Kaiju (Japanese for “monster” - something made exhaustively clear if you watched any of Guillermo del Toro’s plodding, nonsensical “Pacific Rim”) you’ll see the requisite shots of anonymous roving citizens gazing upward in horror, running full tilt, and glancing over their shoulders as cars tumble over the Golden Gate Bridge, sewer gasses explode, and your favorite bodega is demolished with a sweep of Godzilla’s powerful hind parts. But will you get your money’s worth? Should you spend the extra couple of bucks for 3-D?

Though the solstice is not for a few weeks, Memorial Day weekend was a call to your corner lookout, warning you to hit the bricks ‘cause the heat is just around the corner. Yes, summer is coming for every good movie-loving, grill-stoking, sparkler-waving, processed cheese covered totcho-eating American (totchos are like nachos, with tater-tots instead of chips… yes, these exist, and they’re good for you!). This also means that blockbuster Hollywood hits explode into theaters like sling-shot water balloons, and this year is no exception with “Spiderman 2”, “Godzilla”, and the new “X-Men” movie having already jumped the summer gun. 

Using smiles, warm hugs, fresh-baked goods, outright manipulation, and, occasionally, a baseball bat, Hollywood mothers shaped our favorite characters to be the men and women they are today. We all have mothers, after all – or did. Even the most evil entities the world has ever seen – Hitler, Godzilla, Michael Bay – have or had mothers who loved them. The characters in our favorite films are no different, and would probably be sending their mothers some cinematic roses if they could. So, just in time for Mother’s Day, we bring you the most memorable movie moms from the best films ever made.