[Warning: Contains spoilers!!] A green lawn, red roses, and a white picket fence. Red lipstick, a pink sweater, and beautiful blonde hair. Yellow curtains, a yellow suit, and a roll of yellow police tape. Green, rotting flesh, black, crawling ants,…
The Film Canon: High and Low (1963)
[Warning: Spoilers Ahead] Film critics must always be on guard against the temptations of hyperbole. How easy it is to, in a fit of post-credits elation, declare that such-and-such a film is the “greatest ever” or at the very least…
The Film Canon: El Topo (1970)
Roger Ebert once wrote: “If you have to ask what something symbolizes, it doesn’t.” Such a latitude seemingly stymies attempts to interpret the works of Alejandro Jodorowsky, that great Chilean-born artistic polymath who has amassed one of the most distinctive,…
The Hundred-Foot Journey Review
Richard C. Morais’ novel The Hundred-Foot Journey is dominated by three personalities. The first is “Papa,” the bull-headed patriarch of the Haji family who flee religious violence in Mumbai to open an Indian restaurant in the quaint French village of…
The Film Canon: Godzilla (1954)
Before the sequels, before the reboots, before the television shows, the action figures, the video games, and its canonization as a bona fide pop culture icon, Godzilla was just a monster. A lumbering 164-foot tall beast of rage and eradication,…
The Film Canon: Les Diaboliques (1955)
It is no more possible to discuss the importance and impact of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques without diving into spoilers than it is to examine Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) without mentioning Janet Leigh’s brutal murder. And yet Clouzot’s masterpiece has…
