In taking on the horrors of Vietnam, Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War may be said to mark a departure for the American director…
Any talk of this film would be remiss without mention of its legendary tagline: “He came into town with his cock in his hand,…
“This is the feverish, painful expression of a man who lives in mortal fear of his own mediocrity,” concludes Dave Kehr’s negative Chicago Reader…
The decade of the Great Depression saw a slump in high-end Western productions. This indigenous genre had been immensely popular with audiences of the…
Hong Sang-soo’s 2009 film Night and Day marks many firsts for the director, including his first film shot on digital and his first to…
As perhaps the most narratively straightforward Hong Sang-soo film to date, albeit one still prone to a certain structural mischievousness, Woman on the Beach modulates its conceptual restraint…
Though Days of Being Wild is Wong Kar-Wai’s second feature, in many ways it’s a film of firsts. It’s his first collaboration with Christopher Doyle (arguably the…
There is a remarkable shot late in The Age of Innocence when the narrator (Joanne Woodward) describes a room in Newland Archer’s (Daniel Day-Lewis) New York…
The Coen Brothers have a habit of using an innocuous object as a catalyst for many of their convoluted plots. This is slightly different…
Though it’s not typically thought of as part of the Judd Apatow canon, The Cable Guy (which was co-written by an uncredited Apatow, who also produced,…
Rarely has a film’s meaning been so contingent on purposefully disconcerting stylistic contrivances. In Fallen Angels, Wong Kar-wai and his longtime cinematographer Christopher Doyle use their collaborative…
Proof of the lasting influence of Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 docudrama The Battle of Algiers can be glimpsed in two relatively recent films making a sizable dent in…
A three-ring circus exhibiting acts of murder, mutilation, sexual frenzy, and religious fanaticism, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Santa Sangre has a little something to perturb everyone. The story centers…
John Ford’s late career was dotted with heavily revisionist takes on the western cinematic mythology he helped to define, whether attacks on the genre’s…
The title, Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, gives away this film’s clinical fascination with the everyday by defining the central character only by…
From the start we’re reminded of Kubrick. Atop a lovely bed of Michael Nyman’s strings, the camera ascends gracefully from a basement of snarling…
With a title sequence that references both Stan Brakhage and To Kill a Mockingbird, David Fincher’s Se7en announces itself as a decidedly progressive genre text. Throughout his career,…
Curtis Harrington’s Night Tide screened in 1963 as the second half of an Edgar Allan Poe inspired double bill alongside Roger Corman’s The Raven. It is almost unfathomable…