So Big

Apr 25, 2011 — Brian De Palma brought hip, freewheeling funkiness to the American film renaissance of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Wised-up, cinema-savvy audiences across the country knew to seek out his movies for their scruffy wit, showmanship, and aesthetic innovation, not...

Apr 25, 2011 — In 1981, the legendary critic went all out for Blow Out, which she thought was De Palma's most mature work to date.

Jan 18, 2011 — By 1963, when he started filming Shock Corridor on a rented soundstage, Samuel Fuller had come ruefully and puckishly to view himself as a “Lindy,” a diminutive for Charles Lindbergh designating a prostitute who, like the famous aviator, operates solo,...

Jan 11, 2011 — Given the scarcity of information available in the sixties, director Byron Haskin did a remarkable job of representing some of the conditions on our nearest planetary neighbor, nearly a year before the first close-up views of the real Martian surface.

Dec 7, 2010 — Guillermo del Toro understands the power of fairy tales. Not the prettified romances of Charles Perrault, who tamed the Brothers Grimm for French drawing rooms, or the charming animal fables of Aesop, or the reassuring moral lessons Disney made of...

Sep 21, 2010 — This is an expanded version of a piece that appeared in the original 2004 Criterion DVD release of Charade. Stanley Donen’s Charade occupies a special place among sixties thrillers. In an era of spy films resplendent with macho-driven eroticism (the...

Aug 24, 2010 — Josef von Sternberg’s The Last Command (1928) was first and foremost a star vehicle for Emil Jannings, the internationally known, Swiss-born actor, who had left Germany in October 1926 to work for Paramount Pictures. During his two and a half...

Jan 26, 2010 — Roberto Rossellini’s second postwar film was released in the United States as Paisan, and one can understand why the distributors wanted to use a title familiar to many Americans as meaning “friend” or “countryman” for a work that is at...

Jan 18, 2010 — Steven Soderbergh’s Che depicts the two military campaigns that defined the rise and fall of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, hero of the Cuban Revolution, who became in death a global icon of militant leftism—and of inchoate adolescent rebellion. As the latter,...

Oct 15, 2009 — Our favorite Manitoban, Guy Maddin, cheerfully grim chronicler of storybook psychosexuality and charmingly modest self-mythologizer, is in Paris now for a special event. Though just fifty-three and very much still working, the filmmaker is the subject of a complete career...