Diabolique

Essays

Feb 1, 1999 After finishing Diabolique, heralded French director-screenwriter Henri-Georges Clouzot (1907–1977) confessed that all he had intended was to make a picture that would “amuse myself” and please a young girl who hid under the covers and asked her father to frighten...

Nov 23, 1998 Paul Morrissey’s gory comedy may be sensationally shlocky, yet it explores profound ideas about sexual liberty, individualistic freedom, and the commodification of everyday life.

RoboCop

Essays

Sep 8, 1998 Paul Verhoeven’s breakthrough American film gleefully satirizes the Reagan era’s pet doctrines of free enterprise and privatization.

Jun 2, 1998 In Ray Johnson’s documentary The Making of “A Night to Remember”, Walter Lord says that when he wrote his 1955 book on the 1912 sinking of the Titanic, there was no mass interest in the topic; nothing had been written...

Walkabout

Essays

May 5, 1998 For many years now, one legendary film has appeared on every list of fine movies that are missing from distribution and home video. That film is Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout, the 1971 drama about a fourteen-year-old girl and her little brother,...

Pulp Fiction

Essays

Jun 10, 1996 Ever since Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction created a sensation at [this year’s] Cannes Film Festival, where it won top honors (the Palme d’Or), it has been swathed in the wildest hyperbole. In fact, it has sparked an excitement bound to...

Jan 8, 1996 Dodes’ka-den was made at a low point in Akira Kurosawa’s long career-perhaps the lowest that the director has ever known. In the preface of the filmmaker’s autobiography, critic and translator Audie Bock reports that Kurosawa’s commercial prospects became bleak in...

Nov 14, 1995 Tamura (Eiji Funakoshi), the hero of Kon Ichikawa’s drama, may be the loneliest man in the history of the movies—lonelier than the spiritual pilgrims of Bergman, Bresson, and Dreyer.

Sep 25, 1995 Noel Coward and David Lean’s drama is the Citizen Kane of war movies, as well as the precursor to Lean’s even more celebrated works.

Osaka Elegy

Essays

Jun 5, 1995 Kenji Mizoguchi departed abruptly from his earlier sentimental films into a world of acute realism with this bold critique of the position of women in contemporary Japanese society.

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