The character's in Claude Chabrol's The Third Lover, Line of Demarcation, and The Champagne Murders are obsessively doubled and mirrored, reflecting and refracting their hunger for sex, love, money, and power.
The teen-focused, John Hughes-inspired approach not only makes Spider-Man: Homecoming feel fresh in the realm of Spider-Man films, but in superhero films in general.
French thrillers Diabolically Yours, Farewell Friend, and Un Flic star the handsome and controversial tough guy, Alain Delon, whose off-screen persona was not unlike his hard bastard characters.
Kino Lorber's Forbidden Fruit: The Golden Age of the Exploitation Picture series highlights exploitation films that aim to strike a blow for truth and health against censorship and narrow fuddy-duddies.
It's the little things that make and break marriages and movies. In the case of Baumbach's Marriage Story, it's 25 little things.
Silent film A Cottage on Dartmoor brilliantly captures Anthony Asquith's fascination with the French impressionists' preoccupation with the still, singled out expression.
A man of action mostly dressed in smart suits is absurd, but the true essence of James Bond lies in looking good as he goes about his business.
Something portentous comes out of quiet ordinary postwar English life: three schizoid noirs from directors Carol Reed, Roy and John Boulting, and Tharold Dickinson.
James Gunn crafts a deeply flawed film, but Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, which digs deep into daddy issues, is still entertaining, visually gorgeous, and likable.
Mark Jenkin's haunting Bait exhibits a ghostliness that complements the film's transient landscape of seasonal capital and short-term holiday lets.
Hip-hop, the most lasting and revolutionary contribution to popular music in the post-War period, does not exist without the Last Poets Umar Bin Hassan's work.
The Loving Story's tale of this Supreme Court victory lays out both its legal and moral import, and then turns back to Richard and Mildred Loving in intimate, evocative images.
Although it's fair to state that Jerry Hopper is no Douglas Sirk, it's also true that their careers tangoed around each other, as seen in Hopper's Naked Alibi.
If you had seen The Story of Temple Drake in 1933 -- which would have been your last chance to see it for decades -- you would have known that Paramount didn't dare name the notorious novel it was based upon.
Like Netflix, the VCR diluted and transformed the film itself.
Directed by the master of claustrophobic tension Sidney Lumet, Fail Safe (1964) is one of the most gripping Atomic Era thrillers ever made and its message resonates to this day.
A Fistful of Dynamite finds Sergio Leone working on a massive canvas of intricately choreographed scenes that telegraph the chaos and the brutality of the Mexican Revolution.
In Mangold's Logan, an elderly, sick surrogate father and a young, estranged, emotionally-scarred "daughter" come to rely entirely on the aged Wolverine who is now but a haunted, battered, suicidal husk. It's nothing like superhero films that came before.
In Gilliam's 25-year pursuit of filming Don Quixote, the story is at last made manifest in The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. But the character's spirit is crafty.
Hitchcock's silent films demonstrate that he was not only a master of visual storytelling but confidently made silents as though they had sound effects.
Preston Sturges' classic Hollywood comedy The Great McGinty is an incisive and bold political satire that explores the ridiculous depths of American corruption—80 years before the Trump era.
Natalia Leite's 2015 film Bare picks up where Barbara Loden's 1970 film Wanda left off, each acting, indirectly, as the proto- and fourth wave- feminist renderings of the other.
Gloria Bell painfully conveys that this economic system thrives on our isolation.
Scott Derrickson's Doctor Strange is a surprisingly cerebral, emotionally relatable film. It's also wrapped in some of the most exciting and unique blockbuster visuals seen in years.
Jean-Gabriel Périot's documentary on the rise and fall of Germany's radical Red Army Faction (RAF), A German Youth, warns how each generation's sins can evoke violent trauma amongst its progeny.
The movements of the camera in Melville's Un flic attempt to overcome one of the most inscrutable divides in existence.
Considered in relation to the postmodern explosion that would rock Hollywood during the second half of the '90s, The January Man registers as a pop culture curio that was ahead of its time.
Camille Billops moved beyond predictable and well-tread ground to open up space for new narratives in her films—about Black families, Black women, and Black middle-class life—that pulled on her distinctive and unapologetic worldview.
On John Badham's Dracula. Because the director of Saturday Night Fever is the first person you would think of to direct Dracula, right?
The Story of Temple Drake grapples with the unbidden, unsettling force of emergent sexuality.
Critics and audiences have made much fun of Tom Hooper's Cats. The laugh is on them.
The Ealing name has been revived in the new century, but film buffs will always regard its incandescent era as that period when it held up a scrappy and schizoid mirror to postwar England's depressions and aspirations.
Social historian Sam Wasson's The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood, is a graceful and compelling elegy to both Roman Polanski's landmark film, and the end times of old Hollywood.
Todd Phillips has planted a tantalizing trail of clues throughout Joker to upend viewers' most basic assumptions, presenting a film whose contradictory structure can cause as much mayhem as its titular character.
The early Ida Lupino films hold a particular nuance for female characters and the textures of their everyday lives, which has rarely been exhibited in classical Hollywood filmmaking.
The filmmakers' attempt to mask X-Men: Apocalypse's lack of purpose and thematic unity with a stunning density of characters, plot lines, and fan service. But we see behind the mask.
Andrew Patterson's debut film, The Vast of Night, compels its audience to listen to a radio conversation and watch a mysterious play. Interview with director Andrew Patterson and actors Jake Horowitz and Sierra McCormick.
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