The Japanese-ness of the yakuza cycle in films like Violent Streets connects with the era’s newly violent, high-octane gangster movies functioning as national parables.
Made as a lush vehicle for Jean Seberg, Moment to Moment is an eye-catching, brain-teasing, and utterly bonkers melodrama that draws comparisons to Hitchcock’s Vertigo.
Hideo Gosha’s Samurai Wolf films contain scenes and elements that feel like nods to Akira Kurosawa.
Despite starring Marlene Dietrich and Jean Gabin, Georges Lacombe’s 1946 crime drama, Martin Roumagnac isn’t famous or appreciated as it should be.
Rio belongs to no single genre but exists in its own world of Hollywood tomfoolery while reflecting the unsettled zeitgeist of a non-American world that’s glamorous and treacherous.
The women in Marguerite Duras’ India Song and Baxter, Vera Baxter present images and rumors to the world but retain a core of adamantine mystery.
To some extent, György Fehér’s murder mystery, Twilight feels like a brooding film about Communist hangover, about an inability to breathe.
Michael Haneke’s films partly alienate viewers by demonstrating that his characters feel alienated from their lives, cultures, and themselves, so one form of alienation breeds another.
Frank Borzage, king of silent film melodrama, shows how it’s done with Back Pay‘s tale of redemption and the James Oliver Curwood-inspired The Valley of Silent Men.
Hugo Fregonese’s 1962 Italian-French production of Marco Polo is a film whose history is more twisty than the spaghetti Marco Polo discovered in China.
Juleen Compton’s little-known ’60s films, Truffaut-effected Stranded and Mekas’-affirming The Plastic Dome of Norma Jean, have been lovingly restored thanks to her work ethic in a completely different field.
The 1954 Hollywood adventure film Secret of the Incas may have a whiff of Indiana Jones about it to contemporary viewers, but it’s better than expected for a film that’s almost been buried in a tomb.
