To view The Others click here. A couple of weeks ago, British newspaper The Guardian provoked some vocal reactions from more than a few film fans with an article called “How post-horror movies are taking over cinema,” which made the case that the recent spate of indie films dealing with supernatural tropes represents some evolutionary […]

To view Ashes and Diamonds click here. Is it possible for a film to be revered as a world classic and influence an entire generation of its country’s filmmakers yet still be underrated? In the case of Ashes and Diamonds (1958), the best-known film from the great Andrzej Wajda (whom we lost last year), the […]

To view Hour of the Wolf click here. It’s still a bit of a kept secret that almost every great world director from the 1960s and 1970s made a horror film at some point. Fellini and Malle did it. So did Kubrick. And, yes, Ingmar Bergman has one, too, even if you don’t count the […]

To view Queen Margot click here. Anyone who read my appraisal of The Brontë Sisters (1979) a little while ago shouldn’t be surprised that one of my favorite actresses of all time is Isabelle Adjani, who had a significant impact on my young moviegoing mind in the 1980s and early 1990s. Her list of towering […]

To view The Servant click here. It’s usually compelling for movie fans to see an actor trying to break out of a mold into which they’ve been cast by the public, and few did it so successfully or aggressively as Dirk Bogarde. Though he’d built up a strong reputation among critics and cineastes in the […]

To view Jeffrey click here. There’s something special about the wave of LGBT-friendly indies that swept into theaters in the mid-1990s, and it’s not hard to see why. Rapid changes were starting to take place in a community driven to fiery activism by the catastrophic onslaught of AIDS in the previous decade, and the news […]

To view Dressed to Kill click here. Today it’s easy to take for granted what a big deal Dressed to Kill was when it opened in early 1980, but I think you could argue that no other film from director Brian De Palma is more important in his filmography. That’s not to say it’s necessarily his best […]

To view Foreign Correspondent click here. Here we have it: that “other movie” Alfred Hitchcock made in 1940 along with his much-loved Academy Award winner for Best Picture, Rebecca. Though it rarely pops up in lists of directors’ essential titles, Foreign Correspondent (now streaming on FilmStruck as part of The Criterion Channel’s theme, “The Good […]

To view Dancer in the Dark click here. Long before he was famously excoriated by the press for his remarks at the Cannes Film Festival in 2011, director and reliable provocateur Lars von Trier was already a familiar face at the annual event with a string of awards under his belt including the Cannes Grand […]

To view That Most Important Thing: Love click here. Though you wouldn’t know it from the mainstream press, one of the biggest losses to the film community last year was the death of filmmaker Andrzej Zulawski, a dazzling Polish filmmaker who stirred up attention both positive and negative from critics and his government in the […]