With ‘Barry Lyndon,’ Stanley Kubrick’s Painterly Eye Invites Us to Be All-seeing, but Ultimately, Unknowing
By Tim Pelan I have had a complete set of Thackeray sitting on my bookshelf at home for years,…
Tim Pelan
Life and Death in a Northern Town: Mike Hodges’ ‘Get Carter’
By Tim Pelan Soon after its release in 1972, the film was banished to the dark shadows of cult…
Sic Transit Garber’s Subway: ‘The Taking of Pelham One Two Three’
By Tim Pelan Only the amazing reaction that that picture has gotten, because at the time I was dreadfully…
“It Ain’t Like It Used to Be. But It’ll Do:” How Sam Peckinpah’s ‘The Wild Bunch’ Became Both a Eulogy for a Mythic Past and a Template for a New Kind of Action
By Tim Pelan We wanted to show violence in real terms. Dying is not fun and games. Movies make…
Appetite for Destruction: Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘Phantom Thread’ and the Fall of the House of Woodcock
By Tim Pelan Not unlike James Cameron and his flop sweat fever dream of a chrome skeleton-framed torso, dragging…
Rats In the Attic: William Friedkin’s ‘The Exorcist’
By Tim Pelan Forty-five years after its powerful debut, and with all the attendant publicity, analysis and second-hand knowledge,…
Paradise Lost: How Martin Scorsese’s ‘Casino’ Charts the Rise and Fall of a Criminal Empire
By Tim Pelan Casino in some respects is director Martin Scorsese dialing Goodfellas up to 11. Oh, you want…
‘Miller’s Crossing’: A Lamentation of Losers by the Coen Brothers
By Tim Pelan After the success of Raising Arizona, Joel and Ethan Coen were given the chance to do…
Run Through the Jungian: Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Full Metal Jacket’, a Phenomenological Treatise on War
By Tim Pelan “It’s not pro-war or anti-war. It’s just the way things are,” Stanley Kubrick said of Full…
The Risk Always Lives: Words to Live by On the Set of James Cameron’s ‘Aliens’
By Tim Pelan “My mommy always said there were no monsters—no real ones—but there are,” Carrie Henn’s hardened child…