When Robert Mitchum’s Jeff McCloud declared “Guys like me last forever” in Nicholas Ray’s Depression-haunted contemporary Western The Lusty Men (1952), it was hardly the…
The confluence of factors that led to the production of Targets encapsulate the idiosyncratic period in film history it was born into: in 1968, when…
After Oldboy (2003) won the Grand Prix at a Cannes Film Festival presided over by a Quentin Tarantino-led jury in 2004, an overwhelming amount of…
Paul Vechhiali’s origins are not unfamiliar to the global cinephilia which is attracted to his films — born in 1930, raised on classic French cinema,…
Before effective treatment was available for HIV/AIDS, many understandably sought out cures outside of conventional medicine for the illness ravaging their bodies. Louise Hay, a…
The purest, and arguably most puerile, definition of auteurism necessitates a neat classification of artistic idiosyncrasies. The governing principle behind this approach is to find…
The popular conception of sexuality in America has doubtless expanded since the turn of the century, but its depiction on mainstream screens somehow has not.…
It wasn’t his debut or even his first major work, but Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s opening credits to Tropical Malady deliver perhaps the moment that summarizes everything…
As much as critics have lapped up Egoyan’s description of Exotica as an “emotional striptease,” lauding the film for gradually unveiling the layers behind the…
There are filmmakers so dominant that you can detect their influence in the works of other filmmakers throughout the years, around the world — Ford,…
Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell burst onto the screen in a flash of color, sparkle, and song. With no exposition, or even opening credits, the…
Coming-of-age films are rarely as frank about the relationship between sex and politics as André Téchiné’s Wild Reeds. The film traces the lives of students…
Violent Cop as a title stands emblematic of the far simpler film that could have been. It’s a title straight out of the rural garage…
How does one definitively characterize a child’s point of view? Is it by positioning it as a response to the stultifying cynicism of adulthood, exemplified…
A man, a woman, their bodies wrapped once in golden ornament, and then again in Klimt’s golden cosmos. He cradles her head and reaches down…
Her mother’s letters come like intercepted radio transmissions, or echoes of prayers. In this state of relentless observation, pure receptivity, how could she not hear…
“Something that starts soon and looks good.” “Okay, so what’s the plot?” Anybody who has ever recommended any work of fiction has surely been hit…
It may seem counterintuitive to use Alfred Hitchcock’s famous quote — “Drama is life with all the boring bits cut out” — to describe a…
In his expansive body of work as a playwright, Harold Pinter dissected the language of power with a scalpel. Characters speak in clipped, ambiguous sentences,…