Few filmmakers can take a whistle-blowing dramatization of real life potentially dusty legal shenanigans and news gathering and make it so chest convulsively taut the…
Few films permeate the gestalt consciousness like Star Wars (“I am your father”, “Use the Force” and so on) but in recent times The Matrix…
In the mid-1960s, director Robert Aldrich was coming up for air after the thick stew melodramas of Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte, and What Ever Happened to…
In October 2005, shortly after his groundbreaking and seemingly stand-alone Batman Begins was completed, writer/director/producer Christopher Nolan ruminated. “You know, I am thinking about another…
Scorsese’s Raging Bull is not your dad’s boxing movie. It’s certainly not a story of conventional redemption or hope overcoming the odds. Instead it’s mainly…
Screenwriter David Mamet came up with a Stanislavski quote to describe The Untouchables: “Tragedy is just heightened melodrama.” Brian De Palma, director of The Untouchables,…
When acclaimed French New Wave director Louis Malle was approached by producer Alexandre Mnouchkine with the idea for a Canadian production certified by the CRTC…
Michael Mann’s 2006 big screen revamp of 1980s groundbreaking TV show Miami Vice (Brandon Tartikoff, NBC’s entertainment president scribbled “MTV cops” on a cocktail napkin;…
During the making of Ride the High Country in 1962, director Sam Peckinpah was ordered by MGM to stop filming on location (Mammoth Lakes, near…
As far back as I can remember, director Martin Scorsese has been synonymous with wiseguys, mooks, goombahs, and spin-on-a-dime funny-how guys delivering a gut punch…
There are things we say to strangers, there are things we say to family and friends, and, finally, there are things we say, privately, to…
Paul Thomas Anderson’s debut film Hard Eight (working title Sydney, preferred by Anderson, thwarted by his backers) arose from the performance of a veteran actor…
In this age of television wannabes and quick fix celebs, it is fitting to look back at The King of Comedy, Martin Scorsese’s dark comedy…
On the occasion of John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King screening at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 2010 to mark star Sean…
In 1979, Case Western Reserve University Film Society started publishing a magazine called Mise-en-Scéne, a 70-plus-page cinephilic treasure chest with a series of high-quality articles…
In 1997, an ambitious 26-year-old called Paul Thomas Anderson made Boogie Nights, his sophomore directing effort that dazzled the film loving community. The commercial and…
The vexed question of patriotism hangs over Damien Chazelle’s First Man, a somber epic that manages to be both a very visceral examination of the…
When Alfred Hitchcock came to the United States at the end of the 1930s, having been making films in England for twenty years, it took…
Oh my God. I’m back. I’m home. All the time, it was… We finally really did it. You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah,…
You think I’m crazy? You call me crazy, you think I’m crazy? You wanna see crazy? Well, what do you wanna hear, man? Do…
In 1966, the Italian maestro Michelangelo Antonioni, already famous as one of the most prominent European auteurs of his time, reached a far wider audience…
It was May 1960 when Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura first introduced itself to the public’s eye. Today, this classic of European art films is hailed as…
Twenty-one years on, David Fincher’s The Game (1997) has come to be seen as a prescient, schadenfreude look at the gulf between us and the…
In 1986, Michael Mann’s Manhunter elevated schlock-horror to a thoughtful, stylised, forensically psychological level, introducing the concept of a serial killer to a wider base,…
That is no country for old men. The young In one another’s arms, birds in the trees —Those dying generations—at their song, The salmon-falls,…
According to Paul Thomas Anderson, the self-taught San Fernando valley wiz-kid now entering the second half of his storied career, love is what happens when…
When people think of Tom Cruise, what do they see? That shit eating grin, the Scientology, star power? I prefer to think of Cruise as…
Forty-five years after its powerful debut, and with all the attendant publicity, analysis and second-hand knowledge, from satire to theological debate that has existed around…
Brazil is the demented, surreal flip-side of George Orwell’s dystopian warning—1984 1/2 was director Terry Gilliam’s originally mooted title. Yet it is Gilliam’s comic vision that…
After a much-discussed hiatus that lasted for two decades, Terrence Malick returned to filmmaking with the highly praised anti-war epic called The Thin Red Line,…
Michael Powell, one of the most distinguished British filmmakers of the 1940s and 1950s, basically ended his career when he made Peeping Tom in 1959….
Steven Soderbergh’s 1998 adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s crime novel Out of Sight experiments with form, tussles with it even. Opening in medias res, with bank…
Ingmar Bergman decided to make something completely different upon witnessing the success of his comedy Smiles of a Summer Night in Cannes, where the film…
On only one occasion did Marlon Brando give directing a shot. Disappointed with the audience’s reaction, disheartened by studio interference or perhaps simply disillusioned with…
Considering the fact we’re discussing a wondrous work of art continuously labeled as one the most significant and influential films ever made, it seems only…
Many rightly attribute Taxi Driver’s success to screenwriter Paul Schrader, director Martin Scorsese, and method leading man Robert De Niro—together they forge a Holy Trinity…
No-one does excess quite like Michael Cimino, director of Heaven’s Gate and The Deer Hunter. And when you factor in a co-writing credit by Oliver…
In Hollywood, personal films can often become bloated vanity projects. With Samuel Fuller’s semi-autobiographical WWII memoir, The Big Red One, there is nothing vain or…
Who we are depends on a multitude of influences, societal and blood-borne. Mankind is the only entity on the planet with a philosophical understanding of…
On Sunday 18 February the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) will honor Sir Ridley Scott with the 2018 Fellowship at the EE…
English film director Alan Parker was first introduced to William Hjortsberg’s novel ‘Falling Angel’ almost immediately after its publication in 1978, but it took another…
Almost a decade passed since Full Metal Jacket hit the theaters, and Stanley Kubrick lived a sort of a reclusive life in London, distanced from…
Had it not been for his inclination for porn films during his formative teenage years and one specific ‘A Current Affair’ article on adult film…
The master of the specific subgenre called body horror and the man who put out such classics as Dead Ringers and Videodrome, the Canadian filmmaker…
The notorious enfant terrible of film criticism, feeling no restraint as he butchers trends and practices in contemporary filmmaking that he feels devalue the noble…
Asked by Debbie Lynn Elias of Behind The Lens Online on what compels the director Peter Weir to film such varied stories as he does,…
Published in January 1973, George V. Higgins’ crime novel The Friends of Eddie Coyle was well received by critics and the public, featuring a story…
The Ipcress File, both film adaptation by director Sidney J. Furie and producer Harry Saltzman, and the original debut novel by author Len Deighton, has…
It was sometime in 1980 when Orson Welles finally sat down and agreed to watch The Magnificent Ambersons, giving in to his persuasive colleague and…
The beginning of Minority Report, Steven Spielberg’s thrilling sci-fi noir from 2002, is closely connected to another science fiction classic: Total Recall. The film was…
When Christopher Nolan first announced Dunkirk as the title and subject of his next film after the grandiose yet intimate epic Interstellar, heads were scratched….
When esteemed actor Henry Fonda saw a successful teleplay called 12 Angry Men written for CBS’s Studio One, his complete lack of producing experience didn’t…
Often considered as the first part of the so-called Paranoia Trilogy, alongside subsequent The Parallax View (1974) and All the President’s Men (1976), Alan J….
As a former reviewer for a Croatian film-dedicated website, I used to see a lot of inferior filmmaking efforts. The local multiplex gave me a…
The Frankenstein’s monster that is Justice League, the Warner Bros/DC superhero team-up film that has critics and audiences comparing notes on who shot/wrote what, Zack…
Having debuted as director of photography on Malcolm Leo’s documentary film The Beach Boys: An American Band back in 1985, John Toll has enjoyed a…
There is only a spoonful of movies that enjoy such a reputation as Casablanca, the romantic war drama directed by Michael Curtiz which started winning…
Paul Schrader got the chance to direct his first film after the success of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, the script of which Schrader cranked out…
As one of the most versatile and interesting filmmakers today, James Mangold seemed like a good choice for an interview. The last film he directed,…
An unusually calm, composed and quiet man sits across the table from me and my notebook, patiently awaiting my next question. We’re in Poland: it’s…
Considering the fact we’re discussing a wondrous work of art continuously labeled as one the most significant and influential films ever made, it seems only…
Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner’s path to stardom and cultism has hardly been a bump-free ride. Heavily disputed upon its release, often criticized as an occasionally…
Named by the British Film Institute as one of the fifty greatest movies of all time, Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 science fiction masterpiece called Stalker is,…
In 1963 Ingmar Bergman was appointed head of the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm. Refusing to cut back on his filmmaking projects, exhausted and stressed…
The most personal of all films in Francis Ford Coppola’s repertoire was born between two big projects that helped Coppola gain the reputation he enjoys…
When Gena Rowlands, his wife, expressed her interest in appearing in a play about the difficulties that contemporary women had to face, John Cassavetes wrote…
One of Stephen King’s most popular and celebrated novels, The Shining was initially conceived as the author’s family was staying at the Stanley Hotel in…
A stylish American thriller knee-deep in paranoia, Brian De Palma’s Blow Out is a neatly packed, thrill-ridden film executed on a level far beyond average…
What is now considered one of Stanley Kubrick’s most accomplished films, as well as an example of innovative, audacious filmmaking at its best, was almost…
People often exaggerate when they talk about films. They get carried away, leaving the cinema emotionally stirred and too impressed to be able to objectively…
The most studied and analyzed film of Alfred Hitchcock’s career, Vertigo is on every level a masterclass in filmmaking. In 1958 Hitchcock worked with legendary…
Carol Reed’s The Third Man might just be as visually stimulating as classic films get. The 1949 film noir features great performances from Joseph Cotton,…
Ex-Monthy Python icon Terry Gilliam’s 1985 film Brazil is a wonderfully imagined and ably executed satire on bureaucratic society and its totalitarian government running a…
In the education of aspiring filmmakers, when every single bit of available information builds upon the artist’s craft and know-how, vital role was played by…
The world’s top cinematographers discuss the art of how and why films look the way they do. Cinematographer Style is about the art and craft…
A struggling reporter sits in a diner with an open notepad, nervously jotting down a potential title for his next interview. As he changes his…
A cold, wet, sinister-looking abandoned factory, two serious men with automatic rifles staring out the window, obviously expecting a visitor they deem dangerous enough to…
The short film Cool Hair, directed by debutant and production manager William Orozco-Cubbon, was screened at the 2017 Zero Film Festival in West Hollywood, the…
From the very first scene, dominated by a cool voiceover accompanied by fragments of the crucial penultimate sequence that we’ll come to understand much later,…
As we meet Brian and Lucen, two small-town kids trying to build a time machine when they’re not butting heads with their teachers during class,…
Do you remember Gregory Hoblit’s 2000 science fiction thriller called Frequency, where a present-day son (Jim Caviezel) manages to connect with his long-deceased father (Dennis…
A woman stands in a hotel hallway, switching her stare from a wrinkled little piece of paper in her glove-protected hand to the stylized number…
It’s delightful to see short films of this kind of frenetic energy. Michael Demetriou’s somewhat bizarre take on a story brought to life by a…
Through the years we’ve witnessed countless screen adaptations of the work of William Shakespeare. It was to our surprise when we found that young filmmaker,…
A young boy and a talented archer, who takes his hobby very seriously and passionately, has a strained relationship with his militant, strict, reserved father…
Rajendra Thakurathi’s The Dishwasher is an important short film on several different layers. First of all, it should be said that we don’t base our…
Excited by his inspired and visually captivating short film River, we decided to have a little chat with Kheaven Lewandowski, a talented filmmaker whose greatest…