Despite being born in Surrey, British director Peter Watkins has evolved into a nomadic artist, having lived in Sweden, Canada, Lithuania, and now residing in…
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 admirable…
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 in…
Released in 2006 to mixed reviews and respectable, if unremarkable, box office, Déjà Vu was the third collaboration (of an eventual five) between director Tony…
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 believes…
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 at…
Essential to the success of any siege film is some greater absorption of the concept of walls breaking down. One shudders just thinking about the…
“Do not fade. Do not wither. Do not grow old.” That is the command Orlando (Tilda Swinton) first receives from Queen Elizabeth (Quentin Crisp), who…
Ever since its explosion into the Hollywood mainstream, and that of its globalized imitators, in the 21st century, hyperlink cinema has become one of the…
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 with…
“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 pastiche…
Tucked deep in the uncanny valley of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, is a street of towering, decaying Dutch Elm trees. Probe deeper, and beneath the tarmac…
Perennially undervalued, Joseph H. Lewis receives a single paragraph in Andrew Sarris’ canonical The American Cinema (relegated to the expressive esoterica category alongside Andre de…
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 of…
Seijun Suzuki made his name with a string of Nikkatsu-produced genre flicks — The Naked Woman and the Gun (1957), Voice Without a Shadow (1958),…
As with so many James Mason films, in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951), the actor seems an anachronism, as if his parts could have…
By the time he helmed Silver Lode in 1954, Allan Dwan had been directing films for four decades, trying his hand at every genre one…
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 of…
Despite the French New Wave being widely considered obsolete by the 1980s, all of its directors remained active, finding varying degrees of success in adapting…