You wouldn’t know it from watching Misery, but director Rob Reiner had no experience whatsoever in making thrillers when he... Read More
Agnes? It’s me, Billy… Despite its dread effectiveness, Bob Clark’s 1974 holiday slasher Black Christmas has a legacy that feels... Read More
When I think about westerns, I think about iconography: lone gunman, vistas, a lot of strong silent types. What I... Read More
After two intimately-scaled, white-knuckled Americana thrillers (Blue Ruin and Green Room), director Jeremy Saulnier decides to stretch his abilities as... Read More
What makes a great action scene? Why is something like, say, Man of Steel’s climactic battle an exercise in tedium... Read More
Old ways die hard. That’s the crux of the understated disquiet—dread is perhaps too strong a word for the brand... Read More
Alfred Hitchcock is often accused of being entirely subservient to the whims of the audience; to him, every creative choice... Read More
Stanley Kubrick is most famous for his epics, but before he was sending men into outer-space he was sending them... Read More
Film Frame Friday is a weekly series where one of our contributors will pick a film and highlight its unique... Read More
The first Sicario never seemed like a well-oiled story engine to drive a sequel forward, with its oblique behind-the-curtains look at... Read More
ON PASSIVITY AND VIETNAM One of the first things you learn about writing a screenplay is that a passive protagonist,... Read More
The proposition of choosing my favorite movies of all time is a bit like the seminal scene from Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever where Batman... Read More
“Paul Schrader’s dark mirror is a monument for an age of hopelessness, and one of the strongest films of the year” Read More
Sergio Leone decided to kill the western by making a film about the death of the west. To accomplish the former he attempted to make the ultimate western film, pulling from all the archetypes of the genre and reducing them to their essential, mythic core. To do the latter, he shot a western like it was the end of the world. Read More
“You will not survive here. You are not a wolf, and this is the land of wolves now.” That line is delivered in the final scene of the relentless cartel thriller Sicario, written by Taylor Sheridan. In that film a woman discovers she is in over her head in a lawless world of male-driven violence and subterfuge. Wind River, Sheridan’s directorial debut, opens with a wolf being killed by a hunter. Not even the wolves survive this time. This is the land of hunters. Read More
For the twenty-fourth adventure, Zatoichi in Desperation, the star in front of the camera also becomes the man behind the camera. So how did Katsu, the person who understood the title character better than anyone, decide to direct himself and weave the narrative for the character he had become so accustomed to? By sending Ichi straight to hell, of course. Read More
