Les cousins (dir. Claude Chabrol, 1959) – If only the title had “dangereux” tacked onto the end. The film has some very swirly moments, little celebrations of freedom that align…
Les Enfants Terribles (dir. Jean-Pierre Melville, 1950) – Started watching this one thinking it was a 1929 film directed by Jean Cocteau, only to find out this is the 1950…
The Red Shoes (dir. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1948) – This was awhile ago, but it begs mentioning. A beautiful, nearly sublime film that only early Technicolor could produce.…
Read about the critical and popular reception of Citizen Kane and you’ll see that it was not only a box-office bomb, but even the likes of Andre Bazin thought that…
Another Stanford Theatre viewing, doubled up with Singin’ in the Rain. Unfortunately this was a little while ago and there was already too much there to deal with in one…
The Blue Dahlia exemplifies the themes of postwar trauma and the problem of memory with the best of the mid-40s films noir. It deals with these subjects so explicitly and…
A recent cinematic crush on Billy Wilder prompted another sampling of his work, this time the infamous The Lost Weekend. Knowing of Wilder’s later career comedies has made the earlier,…
The Shop on Main Street (Obchod na korze) won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film back in 1965 (when Red Beard should’ve won), and it’s not surprising that it…
Do the Czechs (and their forerunners, the Czechoslovakians) have a thing for Chaplin? Or perhaps, “Czaplin”? Watching The Good Soldier Schweik and I Served the King of England in the…
Here is a film, of which there are not a few in Hithcock’s oeuvre, that strikes one throughout as much more than the sum of its parts while presenting itself…
This will being with the shameless (but borderline ashamed) admission that the author viewed Frank Capra’s unsurpassed It’s A Wonderful Life in its new digital colorization. I went into it…
