American Me

Oct 6, 2008 — Jean-Pierre Melville’s ninth and to that point most commercially successful feature in France, was an important watershed in the director’s career.

Oct 6, 2008 — It is pretty much a convention of the hard-boiled gangster picture that most, if not all, of the principal characters wind up dead by the final shot. So it ought not constitute a “spoiler” to note that Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le...

Aug 18, 2008 — This modest-scale psychological drama by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger follows an explosives expert with a drinking problem who harbors a great deal of bitterness.

Jul 14, 2008 — Linguistic cosmopolitanism in the Babel-like world of commerce and culture is one of Jacques Tati’s several satirical targets.

Jun 30, 2008 — The idea of self-fashioning—of deliberately taking the raw materials of one’s body and mind and transforming them into a work of art—has been with us at least since the Renaissance. Yet no one, not even Oscar Wilde, has so rigorously...

Apr 21, 2008 — Juan Antonio Bardem combines neorealism with noir thriller to create a new dialect that would forge a new Spanish cinematic language.

Apr 14, 2008 — Allen Baron’s stark, moody Blast of Silence (1961) is a movie of many strange distinctions. It’s among the last of the true film noirs, those fatalistic black-and-white urban crime dramas that darkened the American screen so gloriously in the years...

Jan 13, 2008 — Certainly one of the wildest, most original, and most instinctive movie stars turned auteurs in the Hollywood annals, Cornel Wilde made procedurals of uncivilized survival, in a visual syntax that ranges from comic-strip splat to outright gut punch.

Apr 16, 2007 — Jules Dassin’s noir is arguably the meatiest and most resonant prison film ever made in Hollywood, drawing explicit parallels to the Nazi encampment experience.

Nov 27, 2006 — Centered on the destruction wrought by unbridled female eros, Pandora’s Box would, in its shockingly modern, instinct-driven psychology, end up defining both its director and its star.