RoboCop

Essays

Sep 8, 1998 Paul Verhoeven’s breakthrough American film gleefully satirizes the Reagan era’s pet doctrines of free enterprise and privatization.

Salò

Essays

Jul 21, 1998 On November 2, 1975, the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini was found dead—murdered, police said, by a young male prostitute. However lurid its details (the Roman tabloids ran huge front-page photos of the disfigured corpse), his death struck many as...

Jul 14, 1998 Adirector who knows his genres, Jonathan Demme has never been able to resist turning them inside out. Starting in the film industry as a publicist, Demme was soon hired by Roger Corman as a scriptwriter and then as a director....

Odd Man Out

Essays

Dec 4, 1995 While Carol Reed’s psychological noir is the most compassionate of movies, it’s a poetic summary of twentieth century harshness—of what can be called the inhuman condition.

Oct 25, 1994 Jim McBride’s David Holzman’s Diary, made for less than $3000 over 5 days of principal photography, manages to be twenty years ahead of its time and perfectly of its time. Spiritual forebear to the contemporary low-budget American independent film movement...

Halloween

Essays

Oct 18, 1994 It’s useless to take a lofty view on an instant schlock horror classic, but there are reasons why John Carpenter’s Halloween, alone in the last decade, stands with George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and, before that, with...

Jan 11, 1994 A harrowing nightmare about life in inner-city hell, this 1993 sleeper-hit is a powerhouse filmmaking debut by the Hughes brothers.

Polyester

Essays

Dec 19, 1993 The first above-ground picture made by John Waters was a cinematic breakthrough more profound than Dolby sound or Cinerama.

Sep 13, 1993 If, as François Truffaut said, quoting Renoir back in 1958, “The film director’s task consists of getting pretty women to do pretty things,’” then never did he apply himself more faithfully than in Confidentially Yours specifically for Fanny Ardant, not...

Mar 9, 1992 The ads for Boyz N the Hood, the debut of a 23-year old writer-director named John Singleton, treated the film as if it took place in another galaxy—a mysterious fiefdom far, far away. And so it does, set in a...

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