Empire’s End: John Huston’s ‘The Man Who Would Be King’
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…
Interview
‘Mise-en-Scène’ and Fritz Lang: The Invaluable, Short-Lived Magazine’s Article on the Master of Darkness
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…
‘Magnolia’: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Absorbing Mosaic of Compassion, Humanity and the Importance of Forgiveness
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…
Philip Kaufman’s ‘The Right Stuff’: “A Search Film, a Quest for a Certain Quality that May Have Seen Its Best Days”
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…
The Story of ‘Saboteur’, Hitchcock’s First Truly American Film
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…
Psycho Pension Qu’est-ce que c’est: Richard Donner’s ‘Lethal Weapon’ Is a Real Live Wire
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…
‘L’Avventura’: Michelangelo Antonioni’s Visual Poetry and Its Impact on the World of Film
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…
Downwards Is the Only Way Forwards: Welcome to David Fincher’s ‘The Game’
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…
‘No Country for Old Men’: The Coen Brothers and Cormac McCarthy’s Ruthless Examination of Life
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,…
Duct Soup: The Daffy, Dystopian Design Nightmare of Terry Gilliam’s ‘Brazil’
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…