"Solipsism is great, everyone should try it." —"Philosophy student joke" cited by Grei Marcus in Mystery Train, 1975 There are so many contemporary cultural phenomena that this film is a precursor
Last weekend I missed yet another Chiller Theater Expo. By now I might have missed more than I've attended. It felt weird when I thought about it. For those of you unfamiliar with the Chiller Expo
The typical Guy Maddin film more often than not portrays at least one central character suffering from a form of mortification, the result of oedipal guilt, maybe, or sexual insecurity, certainly. The
With 1967's Accident, American-born director Joseph Losey, who had been living and working in Europe since the early '50s after fleeing the Hollywood blacklist, seemed to solidify his reputation as a
Fritz Lang's 1955 Moonfleet might seem the least Langian of his films, at least to judge by a synopsis of its scenario. A young orphaned boy seeks out "a friend," commended to him by his late mother
Certain shots linger in the mind for reasons that are unquantifiable, unexplainable. For some reason this image of a casino at dusk, repeated, with slight variations, at a number of points in Alain
I see that at least one blog—not one specifically about movies—has been conducting some poll about the "Worst Movie Ever," or some such, and has, in so doing, engendered a lot of not-quite-argument in
The immaculate dissolve above occurs very near the end of Sirk's 1958 masterpiece, his penultimate Hollywood film. The film's hero, Ernst Graeber (John Gavin), a German soldier who we first see as part
There's a reason that 1947's Brighton Rock, produced by Roy Boulting, directed by John Boulting, and co-scripted by Graham Greene and Terrence Ratitgan, from Greene's novel, is rarely mentioned as one
What makes a film, or any work of art for that matter, avant-garde? Many of us do know that the literal translation of the French term means something along the lines of "ahead of its time," but very
John M. Stahl's 1945 Leave Her To Heaven is a terrific film to spring on your less well-informed friends who think 1940s films, particularly 40s "women's pictures," as it were, are silly and trivial
There's one way in which Maurice Pialat's 1968 L'Enfance nue (Naked Childhood) fundamentally differs from the other two films about (male) childhood with which it otherwise stands pillar to pillar. Those