“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...

HandMade Films was formed by George Harrison and his business manager, Denis O’Brien, for the express purpose of bankrolling Monty Python’s Life of Brian – so it was only natural that the company became a clearinghouse for Python-related film projects in the early ’80s. These included Live...

With a Friend Like Harry (2000) is in essence a thriller, but it chills with the creeping dread of a horror film. This tightly-plotted, slightly surreal French production has unfortunately slipped gently into obscurity. Twenty years after its release, director Dominik Moll’s quietly chilling...

Blue Steel feels like an overlooked entry in Kathryn Bigelow’s filmography. It doesn’t have the online appeal of Point Break, from which Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze gifs populate Twitter timelines. It doesn’t have the history-making distinction of The Hurt Locker, for which Bigelow...

“So open up the window and let me breathe.I said open up the window, shh-shh-shh-shh-shh, and let me breathe.I'm looking down to the street below, Lord, I cried for you,Ha ha, I cried, I cried for you, ha ha. Oh, Lord. The cool room Lord, is a fool's room.The cool room Lord, is a fool's...

Midsommar. The Invisible Man. Hereditary.  It's a common staple of horror, but lately lots of genre films have featured (white) women who are perceived as weak-minded and unstable until suddenly (and sometimes horrifyingly) they are not. Recent film criticism has interrogated the implications...

It’s tempting to pretend that Gene Hackman’s career ended with The Royal Tenenbaums. More than three decades after his breakout performance in Bonnie and Clyde, the actor is at his prickly best as Royal, an absentee father in the last act of his life who’s hoping to reconnect with the family...

Director Ari Aster’s goal with Hereditary wasn't to make a horror film - it's a family drama, first and foremost, portraying one family's tragedies, one after another, via known horror tropes. The results are even more frightening than the conventional horror effort. Annie Graham (a phenomenal...