Kiju Yoshida’s Escape from Japan
The Japanese New Wave of the late 1950s/early 1960s introduced the world to a number of rising directors who are now icons of cinema like Nagisa Oshima, Hiroshi Teshigahara, Shohei Imamura and Masahiro...
View ArticleLily in Wonderland
Louis Malle has never been the sort of filmmaker critics could easily pigeonhole in terms of his style and interests. He’s worked in practically every film genre (thriller, social satire, melodrama,...
View ArticleA Poor Man’s Grand Prix
In 1966 director John Frankenheimer, a race car enthusiast, was able to realize a long-cherished dream: to make a film about the Grand Prix racing circuit focusing on several drivers and their personal...
View ArticleTo Dream is To Fly
In 1979, the Somoza dictatorship of Nicaragua was overthrown by the FSLN (Sandinista National Liberation Front) and it led to a decades long war with the country’s National Guard and the U.S. backed...
View ArticleThe Black Sheep of the Family
A relic from an earlier era when gothic Victorian melodramas were all the rage, Uncle Silas (1947, released in the U.S. as The Inheritance) is an adaptation of Irish writer J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s novel...
View ArticleSenilità aka Careless (1962)
Italian novelist Italo Svevo was the pseudonym for Ettore Schmitz, a novelist and short story writer who was born in Trieste in 1861. After publishing two unsuccessful novels, he gave up writing until...
View ArticleMonster Mash
During the 1930’s and early forties, Universal Studios rode the crest of a horror film craze that made them rich and famously established them as the home of Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolf Man, the...
View ArticleThe Education of Miss Blum
There have been enough movies about teachers facing challenging classroom situations and unsympathetic staff and school board members to comprise a film genre of its own. And it is not limited to just...
View ArticleExpect the Unexpected
When a movie refuses to fit snugly into a specific genre, that could be a sign that the filmmakers were either unable to capture the desired approach and tone or that the story/screenplay dictated a...
View ArticleBreak Up the Dance and Other Film Shorts from Poland
At an early age Roman Polanski began to realize his true ambition to be a filmmaker with a series of short films which were made during his time as a student at Poland’s prestigious National Film...
View ArticlePlaying the Odds
During his years as a contract director at Warner Bros., William Wellman made his mark early with the influential gangster drama The Public Enemy (1931) but didn’t have another major box office success...
View ArticleWolves, Pigs and Men
Among the many post-WW2 Japanese filmmakers who emerged in the 1960s and hit their stride in the seventies, Kinji Fukasaku was one of the most prominent and critically acclaimed directors in his own...
View ArticleThe Rashomon Moment: Bob Dylan at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival
In the winter of 2007 moviegoers were given a choice to see numerous impersonations of the artist known as Bob Dylan in a semi-experimental biopic or experience the living legend in concert at the...
View ArticleThe Stiletto Club
Conspiracy thrillers have been a popular subgenre in movies ever since the silent era with such memorable entries as The Ace of Hearts (1921) in which Lon Chaney stars as a member of a secret society...
View ArticleFashion in the Nuclear Age
The fashion industry has always been fair game as a target for satirists but the majority of movies about the fashion world have mostly been glamorizations of it (Funny Face, The Devil Wore Prada) or...
View ArticleThree Men and a Baby
Moviegoers often complain about the Hollywood practice of remaking a film that was popular the first time around so why make it again. The answer is obvious. A good story is worth retelling again and...
View ArticlePortable Grindhouse: The Lost Art of the VHS Box
Fantagraphics Books, which was founded in 1976 by Gary Groth and Michael Catron, has always been one of the most creative and unique publishers of graphic novels, manga, comic strip anthologies and...
View ArticleGeorgia on My Mind
Svaneti is not a planet in the solar system or some alternate universe out of a science fiction fantasy but it might as well be. In truth, it is a remote region located in the northwestern part of the...
View ArticleSherlock Holmes vs. Jack the Ripper
It seems surprising that Sir Author Conan Doyle’s most famous creation, Sherlock Holmes, and London’s most famous serial killer who stalked the Whitechapel neighborhood in 1888, were never brought...
View ArticleBoy on a Mission
Qassam is a ten-year old living in the Iranian town of Malayer who is obsessed with soccer. When he isn’t skipping classes at school to play the game in back alleys, he is stealing money from his...
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