Married to the Enemy: The Pathological Obsession Beneath Michael Cimino’s ‘Year of the Dragon’
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…
Filmmaking
A Carpenter of Death and His Four Horsemen: Samuel Fuller’s ‘The Big Red One’
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…
Limitation of Life: You Can’t Go Back in John Frankenheimer’s ‘Seconds’
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…
Ridley Scott’s ‘The Duellists’: A Startling Debut of Honour
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…
Alan Parker’s ‘Angel Heart’ Is Astonishing as Hell
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…
‘Eyes Wide Shut’: A Tense, Nightmarish Exploration of Marriage and Sexuality in Kubrick’s Ultimate Film
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…
‘Boogie Nights’: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Priceless 155-Minute Film School
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…
‘A History of Violence’: David Cronenberg’s Superb Study of the Basic Impulses that Drive Humanity
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…
A Conversation with François Truffaut: A Window into the Mind and Practices of the Pillar of the French New Wave
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…
Subject to the Requirements of the Service: Peter Weir’s ‘Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World’
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,…