Screen Test #1

Aug 15, 2011 — Celebrated as Stanley Kubrick’s first mature film and made when he was only twenty-eight years old, The Killing (1956) is remarkable for boldly announcing so many of the stylistic and thematic preoccupations that would become important constants of his cinema....

Dec 7, 2010 — In 1981, it seemed to me that a new era of fantastic cinema was upon us.

Dec 7, 2010 — “Eroticism,” Luis Buñuel told an interviewer, “is a diabolic pleasure that is related to death and rotting flesh.” No filmmaker conveys this idea with more ingenuity and macabre gusto than David Cronenberg, whose movies (hilariously, terrifyingly) illustrate the equation of...

Nov 23, 2010 — Easy Rider is a record of a certain time in American history, and a chronicle of a culture clash that never quite ended.

Nov 8, 2010 — To say that Lars von Trier deals in provocation and controversy is like saying John Ford made westerns: obviously true, but far from giving a measure of the director’s importance. Ever since The Element of Crime polarized critics at Cannes...

Mar 16, 2009 — This long-underappreciated giant of Japanese cinema was an innovative visual stylist and a born storyteller who preferred to make films about outsiders.

Jun 19, 2006 — Decades after its backyard birth, Jack Woods’s DIY horror movie has forged a model of inspiration for succeeding generations of effects artists and low-budget filmmakers.

May 15, 2000 — In René Clair’s ebullient early talkie, an unsentimental love of humanity permeates every frame.