A true loner, writer/director Alex Cox has zealously avoided participating in mainstream Hollywood films throughout his career. One look at Cox’s best known film, 1984’s Repo Man, makes it clear that he is not a filmmaker concerned with being conventional….
Long thought to be impossible to film, David Cronenberg’s interpretation of the William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch is undoubtedly a peculiar movie. However, given Cronenberg’s apparent enjoyment of the grotesque—this is the guy who made The Fly, and Dead Ringers—he…
Colonel Blimp started as a comic strip by David Low in the 1930’s. The strip was a satirical look at the aging military generals of the time; creaky tough old birds who hammered home their traditional English virtues, despite being…
“He wanted to die with me, and I dreamed of being lost forever in his arms.” Narrated from the point of view of fifteen-year-old Holly Sargis (Sissy Spacek) Terrence Malick’s Badlands can be seen as a kind of modern day…
Shot on a shoestring budget by a group of industrial filmmakers who had never produced a feature film, The Blob, released in 1959, became the most successful monster film of the decade. Filmed in rural Pennsylvania, the director Irvin S….
Based on a Japanese short story of the same name, Sansho the Bailiff depicts a world of inexorable cruelty. 11th century Japan is an era when, as the opening credits describe it: “mankind had not yet awakened as human beings.”…
Given the amount of “reality” television on the air these days, I suppose most of us are a bit numb to it all. Few will argue that the line between reality and fiction has blurred considerably. Even a few reality…
The Belgium writer/director team of brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have a history of taking on parenting and childhood in a head-on manner. The Kid with a Bike maintains that approach, peeling back the layers on each of the main…
An extension of the themes that dominated films of the late 1960’s—youthful alienation and disillusionment—1971’s Two-Lane Blacktop is set against the vast, open spaces of America’s highways. Director Monte Hellman, a veteran of the Roger Corman school of filmmaking (Corman…
Patricia Highsmith had a dream career. Her first book, Strangers on a Train was made into a successful film by Alfred Hitchcock. French critics—who respected Hitchcock more than Americans did at the time—began looking for more material by the woman…