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 of…
Seijun Suzuki made his name with a string of Nikkatsu-produced genre flicks — The Naked Woman and the Gun (1957), Voice Without a Shadow (1958),…
As with so many James Mason films, in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951), the actor seems an anachronism, as if his parts could have…
By the time he helmed Silver Lode in 1954, Allan Dwan had been directing films for four decades, trying his hand at every genre one…
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 of…
Despite the French New Wave being widely considered obsolete by the 1980s, all of its directors remained active, finding varying degrees of success in adapting…
Our contemporary understanding of film noir tends to valorize the intricate psychological dimensions present within its frames of black and white — dimensions which lend…
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 more,…
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 Nouvelle…
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 second…
In Starboard Wine, Samuel Delany proposes that “we need images of tomorrow, and our people need them more than most.” Queer life, as it were,…
In an era when any slob with a next-day delivery synth can create bleep-bloops in their bedroom and go viral overnight, the musical and technological…
Bill Forsyth may have to bear the reductive, buzzy distinction of having “put Scottish cinema on the map,” but he at least did so with…
For this writer, a personal cinematic pet peeve is when characters fire guns only for the bullets to seem to dissipate, never hitting anything. John…
The post-independence era was a turbulent one for the small island nation of Jamaica. Having gained freedom from the British in 1962, the following decade…
An auteurist’s dream, the films of David Cronenberg have continued to express their creator’s psychosexual pet themes for half a century now, nearly without deviation.…
When talking about the agonizingly slow death of his career, Orson Welles once claimed, “I began at the top and have been working my way…
“I come from the tail end of that generation in advertising when there was usually an unfinished novelin the lower desk drawer. It was still the glory days of the…
Last year marked the 25th anniversary of the Notorious B.I.G.’s second studio album, Life After Death (1997) — the sequel to the Brooklyn rapper’s 1994 debut, Ready…
When Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses was released in 2003 (following numerous distribution delays by its original producer Universal Studios due to objectionable content),…
“READ ME”: a visage lit in orange glow, hands, bodies, hands caressing bodies, the twinkling lights of a Christmas tree, the two words blinking mutely from a…