Fear and Horror

Dec 22, 2025 — Kleber Mendonça Filho programs a series of films that have informed his slow-burning thriller.

Oct 24, 2023 — A beautiful, intense woman stands in a large, dusky room, lit only by an oil lamp, her eyes wide in concern and something not far from panic, her eyebrows tremulously registering every thought and fear that passes through her mind,...

Oct 26, 2022 — Deep Dives Every elliptical pleasure of Michael Laughlin’s Strange Behavior (a.k.a. Dead Kids, 1981)—the flattened post–Twilight Zone affect, the tableaux evoking Technicolor footage faded like old Polaroids, a host of cross-pollinated genre kinks—suggests outmoded code that’s been surreptitiously updated. Embracing...

Mar 15, 2022 — The story of queerness in American cinema isn’t complete without the unusual case of These Three (1936) and The Children’s Hour (1961). Both films are based on Lillian Hellman’s 1934 play The Children’s Hour, inspired by an incident in which...

Nov 17, 2021 — Decades after Peter Lorre’s knife-toting creep Hans Beckert prowled the Berlin streets in search of little girls in Fritz Lang’s M (1931); after Robert Mitchum’s silver-tongued Harry Powell cut down all the “smooth and curly-haired things” he could get his...

Mar 24, 2021 — Performances By the time The Manchurian Candidate was released in 1962, Frank Sinatra had been on American screens and in American hearts for nearly two decades. His bobby-soxers had been displaced by Elvis fans, who had been displaced by Beatles...

Oct 27, 2020 — A good number of film publications are reminding us that this is the season for terrifying ourselves.

Feb 3, 2020 — Nearly half of the awards presented over the weekend went to female filmmakers.

Dec 23, 2019 — Fear and desire lie at the heart of Peter Strickland’s cinema, whether he’s exploring those themes through the sonic, the sexual, the sartorial, or some diabolical combination of all three. With his masterful sense of film technique, the British director...

Apr 17, 2019 — Dark Passages The old saying that there are no small parts, only small actors, has surely caused thespians of all sizes to roll their eyes and gnash their teeth. But there are performances that stick in the mind forever with...