One can never really know the impact something can have until well after a moment in time has passed. Considering the stories shared by the creative team behind Tim Burton’s feature film debut, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, in the featurette “I… Read More ›
Mira Nair’s first narrative feature, the Indian Hindi-language drama Salaam Bombay!, is as much a documentary as it is a narrative of Bombay’s (now Mumbai’s) loud and chaotic street life. Even though its story and characters are crafted by Nair… Read More ›
In the rare event where game recognizes game or a filmmaker puts his camera on another filmmaker, there’s no telling what moments of unflinching honesty and remarkable ambition you will find. In his 1982 film Burden of Dreams, documentarian Les… Read More ›
Being a teenager is never easy or not confusing, unless you’re one of the cool kids who is popular and pampered. Most of us were not one of the cool kids in high school; we were the bookworms, the science… Read More ›
Director David Cronenberg (A History of Violence) is known to many as a director of “body horror” stories. Underneath that horror, those stories remain riddled with deeper, more profound themes. His latest film, The Shrouds (2024), now available via Criterion… Read More ›
In 2021, the world got to see Guillermo del Toro’s (Frankenstein) newest feature, Nightmare Alley, which he co-wrote with Kim Morgan (Seances) and adapted from William Lindsay Gresham’s novel of the same name. While there was some divide on this… Read More ›
Adaptations are nothing new. Whether it’s transcribing oral tales to print or print to the stage or stage to the screen, there’s a long tradition of this and it’ll likely continue for as long as audiences hunger for stories in… Read More ›
My mother and I never shared any common interests until the spring of 1990 when we were introduced to the world of Twin Peaks. Full of quirky characters who seemed trapped in time in the beautiful Pacific Northwest town of… Read More ›
Before he brought us the polarizing 2024 crime musical Emilia Pérez, the Palme d’Or winning 2015 Dheepan, and the 2009 critically acclaimed gangster film A Prophet, director Jacques Audiard brought us the complex romance thriller Read My Lips in 2001…. Read More ›
This Is Spinal Tap remains one of the funniest and most influential comedies ever made, a true landmark in both the mockumentary format and cinematic comedy as a whole. Directed by Rob Reiner (The Princess Bride; Stand by Me) in… Read More ›
Everyone says that they want original stories to watch at the movies, but what they really mean is that they want good stories, engaging stories, stories that they can’t stop talking about or thinking about when they leave the theater…. Read More ›
Film scholar Joseph Fahim describes director Youssef Chahine’s 1958 crime thriller Cairo Station (باب الحديد) as a film that failed to connect with audiences and was viewed as a failure upon its initial release. He also states that the film… Read More ›
Before he directed one of the greatest films of all time, 1948’s Bicycle Thieves, Vittorio De Sica became the face of Italian Neorealism in 1946 with his first masterpiece Shoeshine. Italian Neorealism was a post-World War II film movement which… Read More ›
The best small-town dramas welcome the viewer back to a place they remember but never visited. The town itself has nothing and everything to do with this film, serving as a setting, a cage, and a refuge depending on who… Read More ›
Mike Nichols can be described as one of the best 21st century directors with titles under his belt like Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf? (1966), The Graduate (1967), Working Girl (1988), Charlie Wilson’s War (2007), and Carnal Knowledge (1971), so… Read More ›
It only takes one person’s moment of greed to poison the lives of countless others. This isn’t to suggest that individuals aren’t in control of their choices, but, if one ascribes to Chaos Theory, there’s a strong inclination that our… Read More ›
This film is a miracle of cinema. Let me explain. After struggles making the film, including production delays, cast conflicts, and more, William Friedkin’s tense masterpiece of a thriller Sorcerer was finally released in cinemas in 1977. Another film released… Read More ›
Director Terry Gilliam has always been a difficult talent for me to connect with. His films relish in a level of weirdness that never lands as intended. Movies like Time Bandits (1981) and 12 Monkeys (1995) never left a significant… Read More ›
There’s a key scene in Charles Burnett’s highly influential 1977 classic Killer of Sheep that is indicative of what one would call the Black experience. A mother puts on makeup in the mirror as her young daughter plays with her… Read More ›
It is more fitting than ironic that an impressionistic biopic about the acclaimed neo-expressionist painter Jean-Michel Basquiat would also be written and directed by another painter. For his directorial debut (the first in a line of acclaimed releases including Before… Read More ›