Father Stu

Feb 16, 2004 — Henri-Georges Clouzot took the standard ingredients of the Continental-Films detective movies and used them to make something darker and more complex—to make, in fact, the first classic French film noir.

Mar 10, 2003 — Vilgot Sjöman’s cultural-sexual sensation sparked much critical and popular mayhem, only to be consigned to nearly instantaneous oblivion.

Sep 23, 2002 — In 1940 and 1941, David O. Selznick won back-to-back Academy Awards for Best Picture. In 1942, unsurprisingly, he was depressed. His wife, Irene, persuaded him to seek help, and, less than one year later, hale and hardy, he was eager...

Oct 15, 2001 — Preston Sturges’s beloved comedy provides insights into the way Hollywood formulas work on us.

Jun 18, 2001 — Pent-up, unfulfilled sexuality spills onto the screen in Douglas Sirk’s sumptuous melodrama.

Nov 13, 2000 — Featuring what may be the only 1950s monster that could not be destroyed, this cult classic warns parents to listen to their kids because the world they understood and controlled is over.

Feb 1, 1999 — After finishing Diabolique, heralded French director-screenwriter Henri-Georges Clouzot (1907–1977) confessed that all he had intended was to make a picture that would “amuse myself” and please a young girl who hid under the covers and asked her father to frighten...

Jan 15, 1996 — If Akira Kurosawa is the John Ford of Japanese samurai dramas, then director Kihachi Okamoto—a specialist in action films, with a particulat accent on violence and raw characterizations—is the samurai film’s Sam Fuller.

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.

Nov 19, 1992 — In Hieronymous Karl Friedrich, Baron von Munchausen, the greatest liar in history outside of politics, director Terry Gilliam has found perhaps his closest fictional counterpart.