As the 1950s progressed, Nicholas Ray found himself in an increasingly precarious, even fraught relationship with filmmaking. He directed 14 films in 10 years,…
Millennium Mambo, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 2001 romantic drama, premiered at that year’s Cannes Film Festival where it received a rather muted response, even from admirers…
The great director Paul W.S. Anderson expressed irritation in his commentary track on Alien vs. Predator (2004) to the common descriptor used to label…
When High and Low was released in 1963, Akira Kurosawa had been working his way through some of the world’s great literary works for…
Engagement with Yasujirō Ozu’s work often prompts descriptors like “restrained,” “artisanal,” or even “conservative,” and appraisals of his films regularly point to their stubborn…
Michelangelo Antonioni’s endlessly digressive Blow-Up (1966), the Italian director’s first of four films produced outside his home country, features a particular digression that links it directly…
When was the last time you visited a foreign city and didn’t look up things to do? Didn’t crowd-source recommendations, rely on offline maps…
In 1960, Merle Haggard was released from jail — he served a two-year stint in San Quentin for burglary. Before long, Hag started recording…
Following the success and acclaim of his reality-bending 1997 directorial debut Perfect Blue — a feverish take on the Giallo genre, filtered through a…
In Johnny Guitar, Nicholas Ray’s phantasmagorical 1954 Western, it takes fewer than two minutes for a deafening explosion of dynamite to ring out. The…
At first glance, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence seems to exist in opposition to its creator’s body of work. Directed and co-written by Nagisa Ôshima,…
Few directors have embodied the ethos of their own films quite so fully as Robert Aldrich; fiercely independent, constantly navigating the fickle vicissitudes of…
Few directors have had a run of films as impressive as Abel Ferrara managed in the 1990s. In total, he released eight features during…
“Only Minnelli believes implicitly in the power of his camera to transform trash into art, and corn into caviar. Minnelli believes more in beauty…
Experience really can make all the difference: Samuel Fuller’s films could only have come from a real-life war veteran, and Bull Durham could only…
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…