If any two films could stand in for the scabrous and undervalued genre work that made up the bulk of the late Tobe…
The worldwide reputation of Johnnie To, who has sat at the head of the table of Hong Kong genre directors since about…
“Picture a flat surface. Out of the surface, one letter rises.”
“From the alphabet?”
—After Last Season
“I want the racists to talk like racists. For a film on robbery, I’d ask someone to steal. But even if it’s a fake…
“The information highway is leading straight to hell…”
—Abel Ferrara
No movie made in the 1940s is quite like The Iron Crown, Alessandro Blasetti’s sumptuous fantasy epic of one-eyed…
A man’s voice, a melodious baritone, is heard over the black void of the screen. “The magnificence of the Ambersons…
“I’ve been to plenty of cities, and they ain’t nothin’ but trouble.”
—Trouble In Mind
“How can you wear a white wedding dress over your filthy body?”
—The Cross Of Love
Miyamoto Musashi, one of a slew of patriotic films about swordsmen produced in wartime Japan, is the closest thing to a…
“The result was obviously a rather incoherent film.”
—Jean Renoir, Cahiers Du Cinema (May 1964)
It was a buddy who collected film prints of 1970s hardcore porn—a real specialist, a historian—that introduced me to A…
It’s a strange world…
—Blue Velvet
The first shot of Reckless Kelly is a sight gag: a coral-filtered aerial establishing shot of sun-dappled waves and a…
1996 was a good year for popcorn blockbusters and hip French movies. It was the year that a bunch of great or at least…
Brother, the little $50,000 Russian hit man movie that could, is a true piece of junk art, equal parts crude and…
Between Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and the inexhaustible Rio Bravo, Howard Hawks, one of the defining greats of American…
Time now for a trip into the depository of dimly remembered Hollywood vanity projects, where the self-produced flops go…
Within Canon City, there is another city: A grim place of gray stone walls…
Globalization is a clunky word, the offspring of a three-way of business, politics, and academia. It’s also one of…