**What follows is the inaugural KtC entry for the recently added 1950s canon. Make sure to check out all of the 1950s inclusions (and the rest of the canon in its current entirety). Minnelli’s melodramas, always receding behind his much more popular musicals and comedies, are films that belie their very label; they avoid all the fluff and bombast commonly associated with melodrama in favour of a psychological depth and rigour that neatly places said films in dialogue with many…
On September 27, 2014, the CW Network cut animation out of their Saturday morning bloc. They were the last network to do so. It was replaced with live-action family-friendly series, mirroring a general trend away from expensive, skilled labor needed for cartoons and toward…
For virtually his entire career, Abel Ferrara has seemed to occupy a liminal space in film criticism, not unlike the spaces his characters seem to so often find themselves in — seedy bars, brothels, hotel rooms, all way stations on the road to nowhere.…
Classifying Blue strictly as a piece of cinema seems like a rather odd distinction, considering Derek Jarman breaks the cardinal sin of the medium by removing any and all moving images from his final product. Instead, we’re given only one image — or, only…
Since being plucked from relative obscurity by uber-producer Kevin Feige, the Russo brothers, Joe and Anthony, have become two of the most commercially successful directors of all time. They now seem determined to emulate their former boss, albeit on a smaller scale. Creating their…
My wife and two children have been at home since March 14th. I worked until the 17th, as my company waffled back and forth over reducing hours of operation before finally giving up and shutting its doors entirely, furloughing all employees until further notice.…
Haunting, melancholy, and achingly cool, Louis Malle’s 1958 debut Elevator to the Gallows (Ascenseur pour L’échafaud) laid the cinematic foundations for motifs and aesthetics that are now shorthand for French New Wave. This tautly paced noir thriller, which takes place over the course of…
A languid watercraft cruising the currents of the Hudson River. “Captain! Something off the port bow!” A rotten human arm floating in the distance. It was February 8th, 1980 — a new decade — that saw the release of William Friedkin’s Cruising. Ever the…
Alain Resnais’s ingenuity as a filmmaker is on full display in his adaptation of one of the British theater’s most complex and rewarding works, Intimate Exchanges. A theatrical octet written between 1982 and 1983 by prolific playwright Alan Ayckbourn, the work is comprised of…
In their 2015 documentary, De Palma, Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow let iconoclastic writer/director Brian De Palma speak about each of his films, chronologically, from early student films to 2013’s Passion. A fascinating (if minor) document, De Palma serves one important function: it locates…
