Hollywood seems incapable of making a movie about super smart or talented people without saddling them with emotional or mental problems. TIME looks at the best.
That annoying, plaintive cry is uttered over and over again by Jimmy (Luke Edwards), the young video game savant who plays the title role. All messed up ever since the death of his twin sister, all Jimmy wants to do is get to the Golden State. When brother Corey (Fred Savage) realizes that Jimmy’s a sort of Nintendo Rain Man, he decides to get him to a big-money tournament in L.A. — by any means necessary.
Essentially a commercial for Nintendo and Universal Studios (where the tourney takes place), The Wizard is not a great movie. It was, however, a perfect combination of two late-’80s American fads — Nintendo and Fred Savage. Full of references to Double Dragon, Super Mario Bros. 3 and the Power Glove, The Wizard is a font of nostalgia for elder millennials. Also, keep your eye out for a pre-Rilo Kiley Jenny Lewis, who plays one of the main kid roles.
Those who know director Darren Aronofsky only for his sentimental Oscar flick The Wrestler will likely have their minds blown by his first film, a jittery, black-and-white thriller about a paranoid, migraine-suffering mathematician named Max (Sean Gullette). A lone geek on a quest to seek patterns in stock market fluctuations, Max soon becomes involved with a pack of Wall Street wolves and a Hasidic Jew cabal looking for divine messages encoded within large strings of numbers. It’s seriously tripped-out stuff (a pulsating brain on a subway platform) that telegraphed Aronofsky’s next film, the drugged-out Requiem for a Dream.
Richard Dawson, the wisecracking British entertainer who was among the schemers in the 1960s sitcom “Hogan’s Heroes” and a decade later began kissing thousands of female contestants as host of the game show “Family Feud” has died. He was 79.
As we prepare for the Game of Thrones finale, we recognize Joffrey and nine other baddies who showed us that terrible, horrible things can come in small packages
