The history of the Western is fertile territory for studying many of the greatest American filmmakers of the 20th century. While none worked exclusively…
In the midst of the World War Two, Australian journalist Paul Brickhill was bored by reality; to him, war fever was a case of…
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…
In 1972, struggling to follow up his generation-defining and career-redefining What’s Going On, Marvin Gaye had writer’s block. The ambitious concept album detailing the…
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…