Can-Can

Jan 24, 2011 — A character-driven tale of driven characters whose professional triangle trumps their romantic one, Broadcast News (1987) takes place after the fall of the Equal Rights Amendment and before the fall of the Berlin Wall—a time when gender wars and cold...

Jan 18, 2011 — In his Life Studies poem “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage,” Robert Lowell wrote of “free-lancing out along the razor’s edge,” a lean, glamorous, tense phrasing that invokes the Samuel Fuller of the early sixties—a director suddenly without...

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.

Jan 11, 2011 — His most personal film as well as the final one to deal with the German occupation of France, Jean-Pierre Melville’s thriller showcases human consciousness grappling with mortality.

Jan 11, 2011 — Jean-Pierre Melville’s film Army of Shadows (1969) gives a dramatic account of the extreme dangers faced by the French who resisted the German occupation of 1940–1944. The time of the story is unspecified, but it is probably 1943, late enough...

Jan 5, 2011 — The blog Dangerous Minds has just posted a short entry focusing on the early-seventies almost-collaboration between Ron and Russell Mael, of the Los Angeles pop-rock band Sparks, and Jacques Tati, revealing what might have been a fascinating final chapter to...

Dec 16, 2010 — Guardian film editor Andrew Pulver, the author of the BFI Film Classics monograph on Jules Dassin’s Night and the City, has distilled his appreciation of the film into a column for the paper. “It’s the title that gets you first—so elemental and sinewy,”...

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

Dec 7, 2010 — This exploration of how technology alters its users was not only prophetic but a personal artistic breakthrough for David Cronenberg.