“Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”–Kierkegaard “He destroyed my ability to live.”–Leonard Shelby, Memento “Paranoiacs need everything explained. Some things can’t be explained.”–Alex, Irreversible […]
David O. Selznick brought Alfred Hitchcock to Hollywood in 1939 and promptly got the British master his first and only Best Picture win at the Academy Awards. That film, Rebecca (1940) […]
“Sometimes there’s a man — well, he’s the man for his time and place. He fits right in there.” Thus the voiceover narration in the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski […]
Shakespearean cinema, like many of the other subjects I’ve approached in my annual film retrospectives, is something in which I’ve long wanted to become more fluent. There are boundless avenues […]
When there’s no definitive evidence either way, the romance of the situation is free to blossom. So often viewed with either fear or contempt, criminals gain a very different reputation […]
Welcome to Hollywood: where art goes to die, or so the story goes. Of all cinematic craftspeople, the writer is typically the most prone to cynicism, because the average screenwriter […]
From what I’ve been able to determine, the idea that Robert Bresson may have taken inspiration from Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street (1953) when he made Pickpocket (1959) is tenuous at […]
The thrill of the caper itself in John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle is more exciting for its participants than whether or not they get away with it. Such is the fatalistic […]
In 1950, the Academy ratio (1.37:1) was still the norm in Hollywood cinema, although wider image formats were just around the corner. Filmmakers could use the traditional film frame in […]
As is the case with many movies that have been passed down to us in multiple versions, the gestation of Blade Runner was a contentious affair. The archetypes familiar from the […]
