Despite being born in Surrey, British director Peter Watkins has evolved into a nomadic artist, having lived in Sweden, Canada, Lithuania, and now residing…
Brian De Palma is the great voyeur, the plump-bellied pervert of post-Hitchcock American cinema. His films have a singularly sleazy feel, gloriously gaudy and…
Twenty years after its release, Tommy Wiseau’s The Room has an enduring cultural foothold that few actually good films can match. Of those released…
Released in 2006 to mixed reviews and respectable, if unremarkable, box office, Déjà Vu was the third collaboration (of an eventual five) between director…
Appropriate for a film set in and around Boston, Peter Yates’ 1973 crime-drama The Friends of Eddie Coyle is about a man who mistakenly…
What’s in a name? Over the length of an intimidatingly monumental career, Seijun Suzuki gave us titles of great and peculiar beauty: Take Aim…
Essential to the success of any siege film is some greater absorption of the concept of walls breaking down. One shudders just thinking about…
“Do not fade. Do not wither. Do not grow old.” That is the command Orlando (Tilda Swinton) first receives from Queen Elizabeth (Quentin Crisp),…
Ever since its explosion into the Hollywood mainstream, and that of its globalized imitators, in the 21st century, hyperlink cinema has become one of…
Kansas-born actor and director Dennis Hopper had an incredibly illustrious but volatile career after debuting in Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause. Hopper worked…
“The place? New York City. The time? Now: 1962. And there’s no time or place like it.” Down With Love, Peyton Reed’s 2003 technicolor…
Tucked deep in the uncanny valley of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, is a street of towering, decaying Dutch Elm trees. Probe deeper, and beneath the…
Perennially undervalued, Joseph H. Lewis receives a single paragraph in Andrew Sarris’ canonical The American Cinema (relegated to the expressive esoterica category alongside Andre…
Is there a greater rags-to-riches story than Charlie Chaplin’s? A real-life tramp, Chaplin grew up dirt poor on the streets of London. The son…
Seijun Suzuki made his name with a string of Nikkatsu-produced genre flicks — The Naked Woman and the Gun (1957), Voice Without a Shadow…
As with so many James Mason films, in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951), the actor seems an anachronism, as if his parts could…
By the time he helmed Silver Lode in 1954, Allan Dwan had been directing films for four decades, trying his hand at every genre…
Since his breakout 1997 film Xiao Wu, Jia Zhangke has emerged as one of the most gifted artists chronicling life in 21st-century China. Three…