André De Toth is one of the great, unsung directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age. As Fred Camper noted in a 1997 essay bemoaning his lack of stature, De Toth receives only a cursory nod in Andrew Sarris’s canonical The American Cinema, with barely a…
Walter Hill famously bristled at his film Southern Comfort being referred to as a Vietnam allegory; such denial has had him labeled as inexplicably stubborn, as he’s even quoted as conceding that the 1981 film could withstand and even encourage such a reading. But…
Adapted from Stephen King’s slim debut novella, Brian De Palma’s Carrie is perhaps the quintessential modern witch narrative. Carrie White (Sissy Spacek), a bullied teenager raised by a terrifyingly devout mother, gets her first period in her high school locker room. Her classmates torment…
To put Maurice Pialat’s 1980 masterpiece Loulou into words is a deceptively challenging task. The premise seems simple: restless Parisian woman Nelly (Isabelle Huppert) is trapped in a dull but financially stable relationship with her boss, the volatile and insecure Andre (Guy Marchand), and…
With the release of last year’s conversational documentary Leap of Faith: In Conversation with William Friedkin, one thing has become abundantly clear — people are never going to stop talking about The Exorcist. Looking at the phenomenon through modern eyes, it might be easy…
Kelly Reichardt’s 2006 film Old Joy has been on my mind of late, a fact that I initially attributed to some combination of nostalgia for the Pacific Northwest (I used to live in Oregon, where the film is set) and post-graduate blues (the plot…
Horror-comedy is one of the hardest cinematic lines to toe, but 1981’s An American Werewolf in London is perhaps the greatest existing instance of that alchemy. Not merely because it’s both really scary and really funny, but because it constantly makes counterintuitive choices —…
If ever evidence was needed of art criticism’s role as a passing functionary in the workings of cultural amusement and consumption, one need look no further than Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. Seen today, it registers less as a cohesive, singular vision…
Jerzy Skolimowski had a distinctive output well before he ended up in London. He began his film career in his native Poland with three successive features from 1964 to 1966 — Identification Marks: None, Walkover, and Barrier — which acted as semi-autobiographical accounts of…
While he appeared in many of his own cinematic works (including one of his most well-known, 1968’s Razor Blades), multi-media artist Paul Sharits didn’t primarily produce work about people. He made films — including looping museum installations and dual-projector projects (the aforementioned Razor Blades)…
