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…
By the time he helmed Silver Lode in 1954, Allan Dwan had been directing films for four decades, trying his hand at every genre…
Since his breakout 1997 film Xiao Wu, Jia Zhangke has emerged as one of the most gifted artists chronicling life in 21st-century China. Three…
Despite the French New Wave being widely considered obsolete by the 1980s, all of its directors remained active, finding varying degrees of success in…
Our contemporary understanding of film noir tends to valorize the intricate psychological dimensions present within its frames of black and white — dimensions which…
There is perhaps no bolder album title in all of 20th century music than Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come. And what’s…
It seems safe to say that we’re currently experiencing a remarkable resurgence of interest in Jacques Rivette; long the most mysterious of all the…
Luis Buñuel’s Los olvidados, released, rather perfectly, at the midpoint of the century, is perhaps one of the most uninviting kickoffs to a director’s…
In Starboard Wine, Samuel Delany proposes that “we need images of tomorrow, and our people need them more than most.” Queer life, as it…