‘The Train’: John Frankenheimer’s Monumental Tribute to Wartime Railway Resistance
There’s a probably apocryphal quote attributed to Winston Churchill in WWII, in which the man of Britain’s finest hour insisted that the arts must be…
Cinematography
‘Unforgiven’: Clint Eastwood’s Eulogy for the Man with No Name in His Anti-Western Masterpiece
Two years after Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves became only the second Western ever to win the Best Picture Academy Award, the first being Cimarron…
‘Touch of Evil’: Orson Welles’ Grandiose Film Noir that Took Four Decades to Shine In Its Intended Form
When Universal approached Orson Welles with an intriguing supporting role in a new thriller tentatively called Badge of Evil, the filmmaker was at a difficult…
‘Catch-22′: Mike Nichols’ Underappreciated Classic Adaptation of One of the Best Antiwar Novels of All Time
It had all the ingredients of an instant hit and future classic. At the helm, one of the hottest directorial commodities of the period, the…
Terrence Malick’s ‘The Thin Red Line’: The Traumatic and Poetic Journey into the Heart of Man
Twenty years have passed between Days of Heaven, Terrence Malick’s second feature film, and The Thin Red Line, his great 1998 comeback, the third film…
‘Out of the Past’: The Quintessential Film Noir that Launched Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas’ Careers
Seventy years since its release, Out of the Past has long enjoyed an established place in film historians’ lectures on the best examples of film…
‘Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia’: The Story of the Great Sam Peckinpah’s Most Personal Film
Before Warner Bros. decided to take a chance and hire him to make The Wild Bunch, the classic revisionist western that would completely revitalize his…
Ballad for an Iron Coffin: Wolfgang Petersen’s ‘Das Boot’
You never see the enemy. Like Christopher Nolan’s triptych timeline suspenser Dunkirk, both quarry and hunter/guardians of the Allied Atlantic convoys our unterseeboot protagonists wrestle…
‘The Abyss’: James Cameron’s Exploration of Humanity and Love in the Heart of the Ocean
Having made The Terminator (1984) and Aliens (1986), two huge box office hits and pillars of modern Hollywood science fiction action films, James Cameron could…
Lived All Our Best Times Left With the Worst: Christopher Nolan’s ‘Memento’
Fractured narrative, skewed perception, compressed timelines—director/writer Christopher Nolan won’t lead his audience in a straight line where a Möbius strip will suffice. Multi-award nominated breakthrough…