A Village Memoir
Some of the world’s most famous directors have made autobiographical features at some point in their careers with their childhood, family life or home town as the central focus. We have seen this in...
View ArticleThe Double Life of Tokiko
Tokiko works as a typist in a business office where Okazki, the owner’s son, is the office manager. He is smitten with his employee and often flirts with her behind closed doors in his private office....
View ArticleA Monument to Objectivism
If you look up the word melodrama in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the description reads “a work (such as a movie or play) characterized by extravagant theatricality.” The Oxford Learner’s...
View ArticleNazi Zombies, White Slave Traders, Cannibal Cults and More from Eurocine
Exploitation films in every imaginable genre from the late fifties to the mid-eighties attracted a specific kind of viewer that enabled U.S. companies like American International Pictures (AIP) and...
View ArticleA Twist of Dickens
With the release of Brief Encounter in 1945, David Lean became the preeminent British director of his generation. But the critical and popular success of that bittersweet postwar romance (it won the...
View ArticleFate, Coincidence and Missed Opportunities
Most cinephiles remember the first time they saw a film by Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai. For me it was Ah Fei Jing Juen (English title: Days of Being Wild, 1990), which I rented on VHS from...
View ArticleThree Nuts in Search of a Dolt
What makes a mad scientist mad? Is it the realization that his skill set is not sufficient to achieve the medical breakthroughs he envisions or the fact that the medical community is too unenlightened...
View ArticleThe Vows Not Taken
I remember the first time I heard about Polish director Krzysztof Zanussi. Friends of mine in Seattle were attendees at the annual Seattle International Film Festival and saw one of his films there in...
View ArticleThe Ballad of Hank McCain
Lean, mean and paranoid, convict Hank McCain (John Cassavetes) is sprung from prison by West Coast mobster Charlie Adamo (Peter Falk) to rob a Las Vegas casino that is owned by an East Coast Mafia boss...
View ArticleRoll the Credits
In their increasing eagerness to capture a wider viewing audience for their annual awards ceremony, you would think the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences would create a few more categories...
View ArticleAutobiography of a Sleepwalker
How does a filmmaker begin to craft an autobiographical film of his or her own life? Many renowned directors have tackled it but usually by using a fictionalized version of themselves under a different...
View ArticleGeisha Purgatory
When it comes to equality between the sexes, do you think life has improved for women over the past 100 years? According to a June 2023 poll by CNBC, the best countries for women in terms of equality...
View ArticleBeauty and the Sea Devil
Science fiction and fantasy films have always been a popular staple of Russian cinema but, during the first half of the 20th century, very few of these genre films found theatrical distribution in the...
View ArticleTelluride Film Festival 2007 Flashback: The 34th Show
*This article originally appeared on Movie Morlocks, Turner Classic Movies’s official blog in September 2007 (The blog was discontinued years ago and is no longer available available) The show banners...
View ArticleDisco Delirium
When Saturday Night Fever opened in theaters in the U.S. in 1977 and went on to become the third highest grossing film of the year, the disco craze was near the end of its popularity. That style of...
View ArticleThe Flight of the Silver Queen
Long before airplane disaster films such as The High and the Mighty (1954) and Airport (1970) with their lavish budgets and all-star casts became the norm, this particular genre was the province of the...
View ArticleShifting Sands
In the Spring of 1974, French archeologist Francoise Claustre along with a young aide and a German doctor and his wife were captured by rebel forces in Chad, Africa while exploring pre-Islamic tombs....
View ArticleThe Inscrutable Wanderer
BJ is not a typical private detective by anyone’s standards. He doesn’t own a car and walks or jogs everywhere. Nor does he carry a gun (although he might steal one from any thug that threatens him) or...
View ArticleA Very British Haunting
There are not that many British films from the 1930s and 1940s about ghosts and haunted houses and the ones that do stand out are primarily comedies like The Ghost Goes West (1935), The Ghost Train...
View ArticlePressbooks: Classic Movie Marketing Promotion
Among the many movie collectibles on the marketplace, pressbooks were studio publicity tools that were created for the theatre exhibitors. Though rarely seen by the public except by film collectors,...
View Article