B

This singularly audacious B-movie visionary made purposefully crude, elegantly stripped-down films that laid bare the dark side of American culture.

Dec 29, 2008 — If I had not seen The Lady Vanishes at the age of seven, I might never have become a film critic. I was the fifth child of parents well into middle age: clearly an “accident,” as I was ten-years-plus younger...

Dec 6, 2004 — In his first freestanding biblical epic, Cecil B. DeMille recognized and revered a profound quality in the American soul—its ability to leap over every contradiction through an invincible sense of its own righteousness.

Nov 11, 2002 — Continued from Anatomy of a Love Festival - Part One The real turn-on, though, was the music—twenty-two hours of it, divided into solid chunks that usually ran more than thirty minutes. Friday night was the epitome of what San Francisco...

Sep 24, 1992 — It was in 1947 that Vladimir Nabokov began writing what he described as “a short novel about a man who liked little girls.” Completed in 1954, the manuscript was rejected as pornographic by at least four New York publishers. Nabokov...

May 25, 1992 — Cecil B. DeMille’s spectacle turned out to be the silent screen’s most elaborate realization of “the greatest story ever told.”

The legendary independent filmmaker challenged racist stereotypes in Hollywood with his subversive B movies and biting social satires.

Criterion Blu-ray region B editions available in the UK

The director of American Psycho and I Shot Andy Warhol shares her love of B movies of the 1940s and ’50s, the metal soundtrack of Lost Highway, and the rapid-fire pacing of ’30s comedy.

Mar 25, 2019 — The writer, producer, and director packed trenchant satire into his genre-hopping B-movies.