When Patricia Highsmith left the theater after seeing Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation of her debut novel Strangers on a Train, several thoughts flew through her mind, the only reportedly positive one being her admiration for Robert Walker’s performance as her alcoholic,…
Film Canon: Moi, Un Noir (1958)
“These young people are torn between tradition and mechanization, between Islam and alcohol. They are faithful to their beliefs, but idolize modern stars of boxing and cinema.” Feeling stifled by his intellectual Parisian upbringing, Jean Rouch first came to Africa…
The Film Canon: Lucía (1968)
Alongside Mikhail Kalatozov’s I Am Cuba (1964), Humberto Solás’ Lucía (1968) was one of the formative texts of the new Cuban cinema established in the wake of Fidel Castro’s 1959 Cuban Revolution. Where Kalatozov’s film was a Mosfilm Soviet co-production,…
80 Years Later, Frank Capra’s naively idealistic You Can’t Take It With You seems more timely than ever
If Frank Capra’s cherubically bright and sunny screwball comedy You Can’t Take it With You seems hopelessly naive today a full eighty years after its debut, consider that a year to the day after its New York City premiere the…
The Film Canon: Matinee (1993)
By 1960 close to 90% of American households owned a television set. This little bit of trivia plays a significant role in Joe Dante’s period comedy, set in Key West, Florida in October of 1962 when channels began broadcasting President…
The Film Canon: The Great Silence (1968)
At first glance there is little to distinguish between Jean-Louis Trintignant’s spaghetti western protagonist ‘Silence’ and Clint Eastwood’s ‘Man with No Name’. But over the course of Sergio Corbucci’s The Great Silence we see, not only a completely new figure…
Revisiting “The Glory Days”: A Look Back at The Incredibles
For nearly a decade, the film output of Pixar was primarily conceived from the minds of animators already working at the studio like John Lasseter (Toy Story), Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo), and Pete Doctor (Monster’s Inc). They were very much…