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Oct 21, 2013 — As a film star, John Cassavetes embodied the kinetic, wild-eyed, insanely grinning villain. He seemed born to the role, with his volatile energy and dynamic outbursts, luminous yet curiously deadened eyes, wide-gaping mouth (David Thomson has likened it to a...

Sep 11, 2013 — When Samuel Fuller’s elegantly pulpy Shock Corridor premiered on September 11, 1963, surely few would have predicted we’d look back on it as a benchmark of American cinema. But this intense film—about a Pulitzer Prize–seeking journalist who goes undercover in...

Jun 25, 2013 — For our new release of Shoah, director Claude Lanzmann sat down with critic Serge Toubiana to talk about his philosophy and approach in making the formidable investigation into the Nazi extermination of Jews during World War II. One of the...

Jun 25, 2013 — How Claude Lanzmann made a thoughtful film about the unthinkable and unfilmable.

Jun 14, 2012 — Few movies feel as cold-blooded as Danny Boyle’s Shallow Grave, a fact attributable as much to its striking and sinister visual approach as its bleak downward spiral of a plot and amoral main characters. In this clip from an interview...

Jun 13, 2012 — Tasteful British cinema got a refreshing dose of amorality with Danny Boyle’s stylish and violent tale of greed and paranoia.

May 23, 2012 —

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,...

Nov 10, 2009 — “If American independent cinema could be said to have a birthday, November 11 is as good a date to celebrate as any,” writes Elbert Ventura in a terrific new article in Slate. The occasion is the fortieth anniversary of the...

Jun 16, 2009 — In Tempo di viaggio (1983), the doodle Andrei Tarkovsky and Tonino Guerra made for Italian TV as they prepped Nostalghia, the great struggling Russian answers a question about genre films by saying that his Solaris (1972) is “not so good,”...