Jun 30, 2017 — Film scholar Linda Williams explores the political implications of Sam Peckinpah’s brutal suspense film and its highly controversial intermingling of sex and violence.

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...

The filmmaker returns to the Criterion Closet, where he praises seventies thrillers like The Parallax View and Straw Dogs, talks about You Can Count on Me and how “no one writes dialogue like Kenneth Lonergan,” and connects Targets to his...

The legendary director shares the importance of learning from the work of Krzysztof Kieślowski, talks about how Straw Dogs sparked his desire to pursue filmmaking, and selects box sets by two of his favorite filmmakers, Martin Scorsese and Masaki Kobayashi.

Joshua Clover’s most recent book is Riot.Strike.Riot: The New Era of Uprisings (Verso), about (among other things) the way the character of political struggle changed around the time of Straw Dogs, and why. This piece was originally written for the...

Jun 2, 2025 — More than a hundred films likely to make you feel bad in all the best ways will screen in eight cities this month.

Apr 14, 2025 — The director of Wake in Fright and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz was ninety-four.

Sep 10, 2017 — Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water has won the Golden Lion at this year’s Venice International Film Festival. We’ve been gathering reviews here, and we’ll carry on, too, as the film screens in Toronto throughout the coming week.This year’s...

Jun 29, 2017 — Dorothy B. Hughes’s 1947 novel In a Lonely Place, “about a World War II flyboy, now a serial rapist and murderer, would have violated just about every commandment in the Production Code,” had Nicholas Ray and screenwriter Andrew Solt stuck...

Jun 5, 2017 — Catherine Grant points us to the new issue of the open access journal Film-Philosophy. Before we begin paging through it, let’s have a look at a piece by Benjamin Crais which the Notebook ran last December:For Anglophone readers, Jean Louis...