Several years ago, while parsing out my love for the films of the late, lamented Tony Scott, I came to a realization: I am a Crimson Tide guy, living in a Top Gun world. While the earlier film, a gorgeously shot and technically stunning action-drama about hotshot Navy fighter pilots, remains a...

Proto-indie filmmaker Roger Corman once said, “Motion pictures are the art form of the 20th century, and one of the reasons is the fact that films are a slightly corrupted artform. They fit this century – they combine art and business!” Not the most romantic sentiment from the Pit and the...

Early in Claire’s Knee, Eric Rohmer’s 1970 comedy/drama, our protagonist Jérôme engages in an idle, maybe-hypothetical-maybe-not with his old friend Aurora, a novelist. Struck for ideas, she wonders what would happen if she based her new work on Jérôme – noting, as she does, the little...

Imagine an early 20th century drawing room, or alternatively, a fog-laden crypt. Suddenly from the shadows he emerges—a man with pale skin, dashingly tall and clad in a flowing cape, his booming, sonorous voice, piercing eyes and sly half-smile making his identity unmistakable: Dracula. This...

In the Shadow of the Guillotine. The Murderous Corpse. The False Magistrate. The titles are as macabre as the masked madman that appears in them. From the publication of his first adventure in February 1911, the character of Fantômas seemed tailor-made for the movies. A master of disguise and...

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” – Maya Angelou Small-time thug Nicky (John Cassavetes) is in a real pickle. He stole a grand and ran, and his boss is a powerful and unsavory man who...

These days, Hunter S. Thompson is arguably more famous as a movie character than he is a writer.  Founder of the ‘Gonzo’ school of journalism and a manic, drug-addled Jiminy Cricket to America’s troubled conscience during the brutal twilight years of the Free Love era, Thompson began as a...

“A lightweight story.” That was what Hitchcock called his 1955 romantic thriller: “It wasn’t meant to be taken seriously.” In his expansive chat with Francois Truffaut for the book Hitchcock/Truffaut, the Master of Suspense is more than modest about To Catch A Thief, fresh out on Blu-ray...

Sofia Coppola’s career is nearly universally concerned with the unspoken loneliness of womanhood, and her directorial debut, The Virgin Suicides, often feels like a partially grasped memory or a half-forgotten dream. Her 1999 adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’s 1993 novel is hazy and sun-kissed,...

A coming-of-age film without a slut is like an ice-cream without sprinkles: there’s just something missing. She’s the ‘easy’ girl who’s the butt of the joke - invited to parties because she makes her stay as welcoming as possible. Take Emily in Palo Alto (2014), the teenaged girl who...

“Life, every now and then, behaves as if it had seen too many bad movies.” So notes Harry Dawes (Humphrey Bogart) in the opening voice-over of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa (now streaming on Amazon Prime), and he should know; as a screenwriter and filmmaker of a certain age,...

When Mary Harron’s American Psycho hit theaters twenty years ago, it sent shockwaves through mainstream cinema. It was daring, intelligent, and bolstered by a chillingly charismatic leading performance from Christian Bale as the malevolent Patrick Bateman. But like many films of its ilk, this...

“I’m not a field agent,” he insists. “I just read books.” And while that might be true, he’s going to have to learn to be a field agent, and do it pretty damn quickly. His name is Turner, and he works for the CIA – or, as it’s more often referenced, “The Company.” But he’s...

Of all the strange things to be found throughout the films of David Lynch, one of the most startling comes at the very beginning of his 1999 road movie The Straight Story, with the first title card reading: A Walt Disney Picture.  It isn’t that the films of Disney and the films of Lynch are...

I selected Hud as the inaugural entry for “Classics Corner,” a new weekly feature spotlighting a pre-1980 film newly available on disc or streaming, mostly on a whim – it’s among the new additions to Hulu this month, and has been on Amazon Prime for a while, and it’s Martin Ritt...