Jan 15, 2017 — To make the performance of a tedious, exacting, time-consuming task riveting to watch, it is only necessary for the activity to be illegal.

Mar 18, 2003 — Director William Dieterle’s 1941 film adaptation of Stephen Vincent Benét’s short story “The Devil and Daniel Webster” is a melodramatic fever dream, a hallucinatory tour de force.

Nov 20, 2020 — Standing before his friend Basil Hallward’s portrait of him, the paint barely dry, Dorian Gray implores to some unseen force: “If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old . ....

Jun 24, 2018 — During a period when studios gave him carte blanche, Josef von Sternberg created a sublime cinematic language that shrugged off one orthodoxy after another.

Jan 13, 1992 — Few films have had as exalted, or as tumultuous, a history as The Devil and Daniel Webster. Directed and produced by William Dieterle at RKO after his triumphant Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Devil and Daniel Webster is the finest...

Mar 14, 2017 — Religious fanaticism and anti-Communist hysteria give way to mass violence in this groundbreaking work of Mexican political cinema.

Mar 26, 2013 — Charlie Chaplin manages to make a ruthless murderer likable in his brilliant satire of middle-class morality.

Oct 15, 2009 — Whatever Tom Waits is up to—be it music or acting (Down by Law, Short Cuts)—is bound to be interesting, so we can’t wait to see him in the role of a lifetime, as the devil in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus,...

Jun 25, 2018 — In a new episode of Observations on Film Art, scholar Jeff Smith examines how The Devil and Daniel Webster plays with the conventions of traditional Hollywood editing.

Sep 17, 2020 — Antonio Campos’s The Devil All the Time and Sean Durkin’s The Nest have A.V. Club writers revisiting the films they’ve made with Josh Mond.