There are filmmakers so dominant that you can detect their influence in the works of other filmmakers throughout the years, around the world —…
Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell burst onto the screen in a flash of color, sparkle, and song. With no exposition, or even opening credits,…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
“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…
It may seem counterintuitive to use Alfred Hitchcock’s famous quote — “Drama is life with all the boring bits cut out” — to describe…
In his expansive body of work as a playwright, Harold Pinter dissected the language of power with a scalpel. Characters speak in clipped, ambiguous…
“We know not this thing as it is in itself, but only know its appearances.” – Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That…
Inland Empire is to Mulholland Drive how Twin Peaks: The Return is to the first two seasons of Twin Peaks — a film/TV series…
Million Dollar Baby might open abruptly onto a brightly lit boxing ring, with two men contained in its boundaries and loudly grunting as they…
“24 of your favorite stars in Nashville!” hollers the voiceover in the opening credits of Robert Altman’s consensus favorite and magnum opus. (We can…
Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950) would be Otto Preminger’s last film for 20th Century Fox, capping off a productive (if tumultuous) chapter in the…
When 20th Century Fox bought the rights for a new anamorphic lens technology in 1952, whose origins dated back to a 1926 process called…
The films of Hou Hsiao-Hsien are generally centered on the collision and convergence of multiple historical forces reshaping the “present” in their image, where…
David Lynch died on January 15, 2025, five days before his 79th birthday, and as obituaries and remembrances poured forth, certain descriptors of his…