Point Blank
(John Boorman, USA, 1967): The image of Lee Marvin, perched on the rocks surrounding Alcatraz, about to slip into the deathly waves rolling between him and the city of San Francisco rising in the...
View ArticleHenri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno
(Serge Bromberg, Ruxandra Medrea, France, 2009): The madness on display in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno, a pastiche assembly of the unfinished 1964 film noir the notoriously perfectionistic director...
View ArticlePeeping Tom
(Michael Powell, UK, 1960): The London street corner where a hooker lingers beneath a streetlamp is as phony looking as any New York avenue concocted by Stanley Kubrick in Eyes Wide Shut nearly forty...
View ArticleWoman in the Dunes
(Hiroshi Teshigahara, Japan, 1964): Using sand as the operative metaphor for the instability of identity and futility of escape, Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes blends a modernist cinematic...
View ArticleThe Parallax View
(Alan J. Pakula, USA, 1974): Of all the intimations of dark conspiracy that insinuated into Hollywood movies in the 1970s, none suggested the utter hopelessness of escape with quite the devastating...
View ArticleNight Moves
(Arthur Penn, USA, 1975): With his shaggy combover, receding hairline, and untrimmed sideburns and ‘stache, Gene Hackman’s Harry Moseby looks like he rolled into the 1970s off the back of a truck. He...
View ArticleWho’ll Stop the Rain
(Karel Reisz, USA, 1978): “In a world where elephants are pursued by flying men, people are just naturally going to want to get high.” So goes the inciting rationalization of John Converse (Michael...
View ArticleShock Corridor
(Samuel Fuller, USA, 1963): “What a tragedy,” sighs the newspaper editor who’d previously endorsed his prize reporter’s nutty decision to admit himself into a mental hospital — under the guise of an...
View ArticleVengeance is Mine
(Shohei Imamura, Japan, 1979): The first murder committed by the main character in Shohei Imamura’s potently disturbing Vengeance is Mine sets the tone for the rest of the movie, but that doesn’t make...
View ArticleThe Tenant
(Roman Polanski, USA/France, 1976): With the creative freedom earned by the box office and prestige success of Chinatown, Roman Polanski returned to France, a project — Roland Topor’s 1964 novel — he’d...
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