Around half a year ago, I watched Funny Face (1957) for the first time. As a fan of Stanley Donen, Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire, I expected to love it, but found myself put off by its anti-intellectual point of…
The Film Canon: Les Vampires (1915-16)
The Young Folks has covered many anniversaries in 2015. From films like Jaws (1975) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975), to albums like Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks (1975) and Radiohead’s The Bends (1995), this was a year in which…
The Film Canon: Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
The New Hollywood era of cinema, primarily in the 1970s, is one of sublime virtue for its many directors that subverted the classical tropes and styles of numerous film genres. Crime movies in particular stood out by becoming grittier in…
The Film Canon: The Seventh Seal (1957)
A skeptic in a world without skepticism. The knight, Antonius Block, returns home from the Crusades, with his squire Jöns, without a prayer: literally without a prayer. Block cannot find it in himself to pray. He has traveled across the…
The Film Canon: The Cheat (1915)
“In Paris this week, a movie theatre has become an art school. A film…[is] showing us what surprising innovations, what emotion, what natural and well-designed lightning can add to cinematic fiction,” declared Colette, one of France’s preeminent novelists of the…
The Film Canon: Psycho (1960)
Last week brought the end of the third season of A&E’s Bates Motel, but with this conclusion, audiences saw the beginning of the making of the notorious Norman Bates, the man the world met 55 years ago through Alfred Hitchcock’s…