Nina Metz

The first thing you see in 1993's "Matinee," filmmaker Joe Dante's affectionate satire of B-movie madness, is a coming attraction starring John Goodman (playing a producer/carnival barker type whose stock-in-trade is schlocky horror flicks) hawking his latest picture.

Outside of "Private Benjamin" and "G.I. Jane," pop culture hasn't really given much thought to women who serve in the military. The more prosaic reality — the day-to-day of what it means to serve in what is still a predominantly male environment — is explored in this new work from...

Created by a group of friends from Highland Park High School, the party game Cards Against Humanity incorporates the non-sequitur silliness of Mad Libs with a blazingly simple premise wherein even drunk people — who are we kidding, especially drunk people — can excel.

A few years back, the transcript of an early story meeting between the creators of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" surfaced on the Internet. In it, screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan and director Steven Spielberg sit down with executive producer George Lucas, who originally conceived the story about a...

In a zombie story that never actually uses the word "zombie" — one of the more realistic decisions made here — playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury sticks a handful of survivors in an abandoned building and watches them squirm.

Once, when I was a young teenager and my parents were out of town, the baby sitter staying at our home looking after me — and, by extension, looking after Missy, our sweet if somewhat daffy rescue dog — made the careless mistake of leaving the gate open to our backyard. Missy got...

Backup singers are never meant to overshadow the lead performer. And because of that, Darlene Love spent much of her career in the 1960s and '70s tamping down her sizable charisma.

Over the years, Chicago-based filmmaker Stephen Cone has occasionally done freelance work running casting sessions for the local agency Paskal Rudnicke, which is frequently hired to find actors for commercials and TV guest spots.