‘Coach to Vienna’ and the Muddied Waters of History
“The power of ‘Coach to Vienna’ today rests in its mythic quality. The crux of the story may well be placed in the ‘real,’ but the affect of the mise-en-scène is that of a murderous fable.”
Nine-to-Five Fellows: The Company Man Comes Home
“The generation that had fought the war was confronting the generation that had overseen it, staging a sub-rosa assault on entrenched power.” – D.M. Palmer on ‘Patterns,’ ‘The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit’ and ‘The Apartment’
Reality Is a Deadly Place: LSD Cinema’s Short and Strange Trip
“Drug culture and social upheaval became inextricable on the screen in the 60s; it was a belated recognition on the part of the industry’s tastemakers that American cinema’s scrupulously maintained state of grace was no longer sustainable…”
Memory and Style: The Threads of a Collective Experience in Marcel Ophuls’ ‘The Sorrow and the Pity’
“‘The Sorrow and the Pity’ is surgical and functional, yet unquestionably a reflection of the imagination of an artist.”
‘The Flesh Eaters’ and Early American Gore Cinema
“Jack Curtis’ 1964 feature ‘The Flesh Eaters’ deserves consideration as a lost figurehead of the gore genre, and one of its more formative efforts.”
Cinema Rediscovered: ‘The Story of a Three-Day Pass’
“The cultural energy of the French New Wave is all over ‘The Story of a Three-Day Pass,’ not least because Van Peebles moved to Paris with his young family and published four novels in French as he was learning the language.”
Monte Hellman: A Master of the Language of Cinema
Author Joseph B. Atkins on Filmmaker Monte Hellman’s Life and Career
The Birth of Suzuki Action and Style: ‘Youth of the Beast’
“While Suzuki’s overly-stylized and sometimes incomprehensible films ultimately led to his termination from Nikkatsu in 1968, his legacy safely lives on in modern day Japanese cinema…”
Catching Fire: The Inscrutable Mayhem of Seijun Suzuki’s ‘Branded to Kill’
“‘Branded to Kill’ doesn’t flow, it staggers — it moves like a dying man, shot through the gut, bleeding out.”
I Walk Alone: Seijun Suzuki Noir
“Occupying a middle space between the classicism of Japan’s most well-known filmmakers and the politically charged avant-garde of the New Wave, Suzuki uses the trappings of noir to explore the ramifications of isolation.”
The Borders of Film Noir: Genre in Takeshi Nomura’s ‘A Colt Is My Passport’
“‘A Colt Is My Passport’ represents a supreme tension between American and Japanese Noir, and asks questions about the past and future of international cinema.”
How Seijun Suzuki’s ‘Take Aim at the Police Van’ Subverts the Vigilante Subgenre
“A blueprint for Suzuki’s later masterpieces, ‘Take Aim at the Police Van’ is a solid cinematic vehicle full of suspense and surprises.”
The Last Yakuza in Tokyo: Masahiro Shinoda’s ‘Pale Flower’
“‘Pale Flower’ finds its own rhythm and mood, superimposing frictionless cool on tireless ennui, punctuating everyday boredom with an enigmatic tremble.”
I Love These Wicked Nights: On Masahiro Shinoda’s ‘Pale Flower’
“‘Pale Flower’ is a magnificently emblematic example of the stylization, self-consciousness and independent spirit that defined the Japanese New Wave.”
Lost: Akira Kurosawa Noir
“In Kurosawa’s noir films, characters struggle to move beyond loss — personal, financial and national — only to find that more loss awaits them.”
Avenging the Destruction of True Love: François Truffaut’s ‘The Bride Wore Black’
“In ‘The Bride Wore Black,’ cruel fate rips true love away from the innocent, suggesting that Truffaut believed pure happiness is only found in fairy tales.”
The Crashing of the Wave: ‘Six in Paris’
“Despite being an uneven grouping hardly representative of the best these filmmakers had to offer, ‘Six in Paris’ is an interesting capsule of moments in time and space.”
The Modern Netherworld of Akira Kurosawa’s ‘The Bad Sleep Well’
“Kurosawa was rarely more bitter and dejected than he is here, crafting a sprawling noir tragedy from Shakespeare’s text, grappling desperately with identity in the nightmare of faceless modernity.”
The Banality of Xenophobia in R.W. Fassbinder’s ‘Katzelmacher’
“The virility of the unwanted foreigner is a typical focal point for the average xenophobe.”
Dreams and Horrors in Bohemia: ‘Marketa Lazarová’ and ‘Valerie and Her Week of Wonders’
“As much as I love a good story, the best movies always transport me, in an intangible sense, through the base elements.”