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…
Screenwriting 101
‘Horror Implied, as Opposed to Explained… That’s Michael Mann’s Strength (Will)’—‘Manhunter’
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,…
‘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,…
‘Punch-Drunk Love’: The Hilarity of Anxiety and Blossoming Love in Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘art house Adam Sandler film’
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…
L.A. Breakdown, a Hitman In Crisis: Michael Mann’s ‘Collateral’
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…
Rats In the Attic: William Friedkin’s ‘The Exorcist’
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…
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…
‘The New World’: Terrence Malick’s Magic Portrayal of America’s Original Sin
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,…
‘Peeping Tom’: The Road from Disgust to Recognition for Michael Powell’s Brilliant Take on Filmmaking
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 ‘Out of Sight’: An Achronological Time-Out from Conventional Crime Narrative
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…