Dark Water (dir. Hideo Nakata, 2002) – As horror films go, this is good. It’s about the terror, not about the gore. Pretty clearly by the same director who did…
Nashville (dir. Robert Altman, 1975) – Amazing how much you can forget about a film in five days. Nashville came across as so much more scathing this time around than…
Black Narcissus (dir. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1947) – Mere days before starting a seminar in film and melodrama, I’ll make the tentative claim that this film constitutes an…
When reading and thinking about melodrama in film, there’s no better place to go than to Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows. This is the archetype of the “mode” at…
Slumdog Millionaire is, as J.M. Tyree so effectively put it, a film that fits into that genre all its own, “the Best Picture Picture.” Tyree (in a recent issue of…
Waterloo Bridge (dir. James Whale, 1931): A refreshingly different pre-code film from the afore-discussed Red-Headed Woman and Baby Face, this one sticks to your basic melodrama motifs, very D.W. Griffith…
