The Hindoo Dagger

Jan 6, 2015 — Kihachi Okamoto's The Sword of Doom is likely to strike the unalerted viewer as an exercise in absurdist violence, tracking the career of a nihilistic swordsman from his gratuitous murder of a defenseless old man to his final descent into...

Dec 28, 2014 — In person, Sam was a blunt-nosed nonconformist, small of stature but forever leading with his Cuban cigar.

Dec 24, 2014 — Keisuke Kinoshita’s poignant Morning for the Osone Family looks at grief over World War II from the perspective of one Japanese family. Shot immediately following the country’s surrender, when directors like Kinoshita were no longer under the thumb of wartime...

Dec 11, 2014 — Italian director Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter, about the sadomasochistic bond reignited after World War II between a former Nazi commandant (Dirk Bogarde) and a concentration camp prisoner (Charlotte Rampling)—shocked audiences on its release in 1974 for its eroticism and...

Nov 11, 2014 — Like so many famous filmmakers, Monte Hellman got his start thanks to Roger Corman, the groundbreaking American movie maverick. We brought these two legends together for a conversation for our new release of Hellman’s existential 1966 westerns The Shooting and...

Oct 28, 2014 — We were so thrilled to have the privilege of interviewing The Vanishing director George Sluizer at his home in France in May of this year. In this clip from that discussion, the entirety of which can be found on our...

Oct 2, 2014 — The following is a chapter on The Innocents from cinematographer Freddie Francis’s memoir, The Straight Story from “Moby Dick” to “Glory.” It is reproduced here courtesy of Scarecrow Press. The last picture I worked on as a cinematographer in my...

Sep 29, 2014 — The great cinematographer Freddie Francis’s brilliant work on Jack Clayton’s chilling 1961 horror movie The Innocents is widely admired by movie lovers and professionals. For an appreciation of this film’s incredible visuals, we turned to cinematographer John Bailey (The Big...

Sep 2, 2014 — The following is excerpted from the book-length study Terence Davies, out September 8. See the bottom of the post for a clip of the scene it describes. Excerpt copyright 2014 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois...

Aug 6, 2014 — Lawrence Kasdan has had quite an impressive career in Hollywood, moving from cowriting blockbusters like The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark to writing and directing his own, more personal films. In this excerpt from a new...