Annie is the self-sacrificing mother dear to tearjerkers but to little purpose. Sara Jane wants something that even Mildred Pierce's money couldn't buy: white skin.

The history of blackface has been well documented in American film criticism; the history of yellowface has received much less critical attention, and considerably less public censure.

These films trumpet their topicality, with an outrageous gallery of hunky pimps and pushers, knockout whores, and corrupt cops snorting, shooting, and screwing everything in sight.

Curator Jenni Olson looks at the history of marginalized groups through one of the most ephemeral cultural forms, the movie trailer. Her latest compilation of coming attractions focuses on blacks in mainstream and low-budget Hollywood films from 1946 to 1976.

Her mechanistic thinking precludes her from pursuing the noodle vendor in the usual ways; she can only see him after she has killed, and her sudden appearances and disappearances in his life suggest his nickname for her: 'Pretty Ghost.

The Blade is the director's paean to the muscular, exposed male body and a virtual catalog of ways to assault it — pummeling, whipping, biting, beating, and hacking . .

Vertigo possesses a strange symmetry that raises the question of whether Hitchcock had ulterior, perhaps mischievous, motives to his direction.

What is most disturbing about all of this is the straight, uninflected manner in which Walsh visualizes the story

Set in the years 1938 to 1943, Finzi-Continis is an autumnal work in two senses — the subject is the last golden flash of freedom before one of history's major tragedies, and it represents de Sica's final great work.

Nicholas Roeg drags us into a nightmare of sophisticated sadomasochism — for which we're grateful.

Millions of moviegoers responded to the challenge of her headstrong, neurotic heroines who, like Frankenstein's monster, were made of mismatched parts and bolts of electricity. Her cluster of quirks attracted as they repelled.

From 1930s cautionary tales about syphilis to 1970s porno chic