First Cow

May 21, 2007 — In January 1948, British film producer Sir Alexander Korda, head of British-Lion and London Film Productions, commissioned novelist Graham Greene to write and research “an original postwar continental story to be based on either or both of the following territories:...

Apr 16, 2007 — Jules Dassin’s noir is arguably the meatiest and most resonant prison film ever made in Hollywood, drawing explicit parallels to the Nazi encampment experience.

Jan 22, 2007 — Forget the Beatles vs. Elvis: for me the world is divided into Karloff people and Lugosi people, and I’m in the Karloff clique. Bela Lugosi’s oversize mannerisms and thickly accented drawl have always seemed camp to me, while Boris Karloff’s...

Oct 23, 2006 — The New Zealand director’s debut feature is a bridge between her tentative, probing film school works and her subsequent female character studies.

Aug 18, 2003 — The two versions of Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist romance offer case studies in Hollywood and European sensibilities as they existed in the early 1950s.

Jun 23, 2003 — One of the most unusual features of Italian cinema of the late ’50s and ’60s is the way that it affords us multiple perspectives on the same event, namely the economic boom following the postwar recovery. Where the directors of...

Mar 24, 2003 — Straw Dogs turns on a woman’s rape, and one can’t blame pictures for depicting. But the film shows the woman, after some tart resistance, seeming to enjoy it, and this approaches the apex of what a delicate soul might call...

Jun 3, 2002 — Ronald Neame’s character study examines a talented, eccentric artist, who is also difficult, conniving, uncouth, and thoroughly disreputable.

Jul 9, 2001 — Director Bruce Robinson reminisces about the days that inspired his uproarious black comedy.

Jul 9, 2001 — John Schlesinger’s classic is an exuberant satire of a society caught between its old ways and the urge to modernize.