Once he had established a penchant for baroquely stylized compositions and striking chiaroscuro in CITIZEN KANE and THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, it was only natural that Orson Welles should prove a master of film noir. THE STRANGER, his first foray into the genre (and only box-office success), sugg...
Two idiosyncratic auteurs revisit the worlds of their childhood in these elegiac explorations of memory and place. In his mesmerizing found-footage memoir OF TIME AND THE CITY, British rhapsodist Terence Davies reflects on growing up in the working-class Liverpool of the 1950s and ’60s, his remin...
Italian cinema’s most profound poet of twentieth-century alienation, Michelangelo Antonioni turned his gaze toward the architecture of modern life and found it pervaded by creeping existential angst. Like much of the director’s work, these late-career riddles—one a quasi-thriller starring Jack Ni...
Directed with pre-Code verve by Lewis Milestone, the first screen adaptation of the oft-filmed play THE FRONT PAGE by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur stars Adolphe Menjou and Pat O’Brien as, respectively, a newspaper editor and his ace reporter who must pull out all the stops in order to get the ...
The doomsday clock ticks ominously in these urgent Cold War wake-up calls, one deadly serious, the other morbidly funny. The end of the world is played for brilliantly sustained suspense in Sidney Lumet’s riveting political thriller FAIL SAFE, which offers a chillingly plausible look at the path ...
Affairs, intrigue, and Art Garfunkel! Simon & Garfunkel’s iconic soundtrack to Mike Nichols’s generation-defining comedy classic THE GRADUATE—in which Dustin Hoffman’s directionless college grad finds refuge in the arms of Anne Bancroft’s sultry Mrs. Robinson—helped propel the film into pop ...
Good luck keeping up with who’s scamming who in these fiendishly seductive looks at the art and psychology of the con. Fraudsters keep it in the family in Stephen Frears’s coolly stylish neonoir THE GRIFTERS, featuring a bravura performance from Anjelica Huston as a master con artist not above do...
Jean Renoir and Akira Kurosawa, two of cinema’s greatest directors, transform Maxim Gorky’s classic proletariat play “The Lower Depths” in their own ways for their own times. Renoir, working alongside the Popular Front in France while Hitler rose in Germany, took license with the dark nature of G...
Samuel Fuller and Orson Welles bring a mischievous sleight of hand to these slippery accounts of some of history’s most notorious scammers, cheats, and cons. Based on a stranger-than-fiction true story, Fuller’s offbeat western-noir gem THE BARON OF ARIZONA stars Vincent Price at his unctuous bes...
In 1972, Perry Henzell put Jamaican cinema on the map with his landmark cult classic THE HARDER THEY COME, a Robin Hood–esque crime fable starring legendary musician Jimmy Cliff that went on to become a phenomenon in its home country. Henzell’s long-lost sophomore feature, NO PLACE LIKE HOME, was...
From the side streets of 1950s Rome to the punk-rock underground of 1980s New York, two women drift through the margins of society with only themselves to rely on. In Susan Seidelman’s DIY classic SMITHEREENS, a New Jersey punk hits the streets of downtown New York in ruthless search of fame—no m...
With his 1948 HAMLET, director-star Laurence Olivier created what remains the definitive screen version of the Bard’s venerable drama, a vividly cinematic, psychologically charged interpretation that garnered Oscars for both best picture and best actor. Less likely to win any awards is the hilari...
Jacques Demy’s candy-colored, enchantingly romantic musical THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG may not seem like an obvious pairing with a fast-and-furious swordplay spectacular filled with glinting blades and bloody vengeance. Nevertheless, LAST HURRAH FOR CHIVALRY’s director, John Woo, counts the swoon...
The fascinating and elusive matinee idol turned art-house actor Dirk Bogarde gives complex and morally ambiguous performances in both of these controversial, ahead-of-their-time dramas.
Two career criminals attempt to go straight, only to get sucked back into the underworld in Seijun Suzuki’s delirious pop-art spin on the yakuza genre and John Mackenzie’s gripping gangster film starring Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren.
No New York: Grifters and drifters make their way through the grime of early-eighties downtown bohemia.
Child actor John Howard Davies headlines two Brit-lit adaptations about the fickle fortunes of boyhood.
Environmental threats hang over these two atmospheric mood pieces. Antonioni’s first color film evokes the creeping malaise that comes with industrialization, while the apocalypse itself looms nigh in Peter Weir’s beguiling mystery.
The American author Patricia Highsmith’s dark, violent writing provides the source material for these two edgy European thrillers.
These ultracool, stylish studies of gambling addiction and life on the fringes are a pair of aces.
Kon Ichikawa delivers a black comedy about sexual dysfunction and a gender-bending revenge thriller.
Watch David Lean’s classic adaptation after Terence Davies’s moving THE LONG DAY CLOSES—which references Charles Dickens’s novel.
Inspectors Maigret and Murakami are on the case in Paris and Tokyo in these detective stories inspired by Georges Simenon’s crime fiction.
Two cult-classic oaters: one tense and tortured, the other full of unsolved enigmas.
