In the 1960s, the genre that would become known in Japan as pinku eiga had just taken shape. This was a genre that dealt explicitly…
“So it returns. Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.” — James Joyce, Ulysses As the second…
Peter Fonda’s self-produced Idaho Transfer (1972) exists online as a decrepit VHS rip and a few equally shoddy digital re-uploads. I’ve heard tell of an…
By 1919, 24-year-old Richard Barthelmess was already a star. He’d just played the leading man, albeit in yellow-face, in D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms opposite…
In the spring of 1974, The Night Porter was released in Italian cinemas. Directed by Liliana Cavani, the film stars a young Charlotte Rampling as…
Like many of you, I first discovered the French New Wave as a budding cinephile in high school. It was my introduction to how the…
“He that diggeth a pit, shall fall into it.” — Ecclesiastes 10:8 They called him Von, the man in whom lived so many. Von Schnieditz, von…
Come a little closer and see — you need to inhale. No contemporary filmmaker understands California quite like Paul Thomas Anderson, who throughout his rightfully…
Ah, but first: an introduction. This is the first entry of Flashback, a new column hosted by In Review Online. Here, I play your very…
Socrates: The main question I want to ask is whether a lifetime spent scratching, itching and scratching, no end of scratching, is also a life…
It’s girthy, oversized, gold-encrusted, evocative of pain more than pleasure. No, I’m not talking about the massive enameled penis that makes a couple appearances throughout…
“This language of the unreal, this fictive language which delivers us to fiction, comes from silence and returns to silence.” – Maurice Blanchot, The Space…
It’s worth beginning where a piece like this usually doesn’t, because Munich is the kind of movie Steven Spielberg usually doesn’t make: in a film…
“Knights are now rooks! All bishops must leave the board! Pawns can now fly!” — not a surrealist pamphlet upon obvious improvements to the game…
Josef von Sternberg always had a materialistic streak — it was a necessity to produce the kind of effects he was chasing. He never embraced…
Among the most serene of thought experiments is the suggestion that a monkey, given a typewriter and unlimited time, will write a perfect copy of…
There’s a scene in Alex Garland’s Civil War, in which a man is shot in the heart and killed. The man is from Hong Kong,…
For a film with such a coy name, we necessarily prepare, consenting or not, to play a game of comparison: why did James Benning call…
As Shadow of a Doubt opens, Joseph Cotton’s uncle Charlie is running away from the police. He has been lying down in his cheap hotel…
Watching Fabrice-Ange Zaphiratos’ Blood Beat in 2025 is a wild sensory experience. It has the (ahem) beats of a slasher while boasting atmospheric sound design,…