The titles of Mikio Naruse’s films were once baroque mouthfuls (Three Sisters With Maiden Hearts, Wife Be Like a Rose!), but as his own…
“The mise-en-scène flexes emotion like you flex your muscles.” So said Bertrand Tavernier of Jacques Becker’s Casque d’or, an observation applicable to the latter’s…
Fifty years ago this month, the late Wes Craven premiered The Last House on the Left, a film notorious even in an era of…
It’s the stuff of a million shoddy programmers from Hollywood’s golden age and twice as many cheap exploitation films from the heydays of the…
The American cinema of the 1970s is a deep, deep well of intersecting delusion and pyrrhic victories, though hindsight has made it so that’s…
For a brief period of time in the early-to-mid 2000s, there was perhaps no more exciting international director than Bela Tarr. Advocates like Jonathan…
There’s a wistful touch of George Bailey to the fatefully doomed protagonist of The Executioner (El Verdugo): José Luis is a Spanish undertaker yearning…
By the time Chor Yuen’s Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan released in 1972, the image of wuxia in Hong Kong cinema had changed…
Why does Carl Dreyer’s Gertrud continue to haunt? It follows from a distance and just when I think I’ve settled up — maybe three…
Taking place entirely in the frigid confines of an Antarctic research lab, John Carpenter’s 1982 sci-fi horror masterpiece The Thing makes for exceptionally chilling…
Artist and critic Fred Camper once called Howard Hawks (and I’m paraphrasing from memory here) the “hardest to define of all the classic Hollywood…
Stanley Kubrick seems like an odd filmmaker to claim as having underrated films. I’m not as great a fan as most cinephiles, but given…
Saul Bass’ poster for Otto Preminger’s Advise & Consent (1962) shows the dome of the Capitol neatly dissected from the building itself, the title…
Forgotten for several decades after its 1982 release, Kathleen Collins’ Losing Ground was rediscovered in 2015, leading to a flurry of posthumous critical attention…
Kiyoshi Kurosawa is a filmmaker with a profoundly idiosyncratic streak that belies his reputation in certain quarters as a “mere” horror director. Consequently, most…
There isn’t much left to say about George Miller’s Mad Max films. They’ve gone from the first entry’s scrappy DIY exploitation to Fury Road’s…
In a 2006 article for the online magazine Senses of Cinema titled “Mapping Catalonia in 1967: The Barcelona School in Global Context,” Rosalind Galt…
It’s 1995, halfway through the decade and two years into the centrist liberal Elysian era of pre-blow-job Bill Clinton, a year in which Forrest…