Creep

Feb 22, 2012 — When it comes to depicting actual people’s jobs, the truism goes, Hollywood gets everything wrong with stunning regularity. The rare exception is Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (1959), widely considered among the finest trial films ever made, and maybe...

Nov 8, 2011 — Aflurry of publicity around Fanny and Alexander began well before the start of production. Ingmar Bergman said it would be his final film, and he allowed unusual media access to the set, even welcoming a pair of journalists who kept...

Aug 18, 2011 — Stanley Kubrick’s labyrinthine 1956 heist flick The Killing—an exploded rethink of John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle and eventual template for the narrative convolutions of Reservoir Dog—became an instant facet in the jewel that was film noir, even as it refracted...

Jun 27, 2011 — A rogue’s gallery of vituperative 1950s vixens and night-world tough-guy gargoyles all coalescing in a constellation of twinkling cold war lights, Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly is a film of a thousand stars. Stars of every sort, size, and description:...

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.

May 25, 2010 — In the films of Stan Brakhage, the viewer’s role must be reimagined: from a passive receiver to one who meets the film halfway, actively plumbing the depths of its imagery and the various themes and ideas suggested by its subject...

May 18, 2010 — Nicolas Roeg’s first solo outing as a director is an astonishing visual poem, by turns violent, innocent, and elegiac.

Apr 20, 2009 — The French scientist-educator-filmmaker Jean Painlevé’s groundbreaking work consistently revealed not only a commitment to informed science and effective communication but to the creative expression of ideas.

Feb 22, 2009 — “If there’s such a thing as an ideal time of day to expose yourself to the deranging, hallucinatory visions of the Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg, midnight might well be it,” writes critic and Criterion contributor Terrence Rafferty in a terrific...

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...