Walt Disney’s masterpiece, Fantasia, may seem at first like a random collection of animated shorts whose only common factor is that each was inspired by a well-known piece of classical music.  However, consciously or not, the film has a deeper unifying principle.  Each of the film’s episodes touches in one way or another upon the ... read more »

Like Lynch’s Mulholland Dr., Christopher Nolan’s Inception, or Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch invites the viewer to deconstruct a narrative puzzle – nested realities, stories embedded within stories – that in Snyder’s case allows him to present a series of meticulously rendered alternate worlds. As anybody who has seen or read ... read more »

Standing in an aquarium with his arms outstretched, the Creature from the Black Lagoon makes a cameo appearance in Robert Altman’s 3 Women, but his presence is anything but gratuitous.  Like everything else in this poetically unified film, he is there to echo, relect, or comment upon some other aspect of the movie.  3 Women is a movie filled with doubles ... read more »

Otto Preminger had a thing for saintly blondes. The best known of Preminger’s saintly – and hauntingly beautiful – blondes was Jean Seberg whom Preminger discovered and cast as the lead in his version of Saint Joan (1957), but the archetype appears in his movies as far back as Alice Faye’s performance in Fallen Angel (1945 – the year ... read more »

No one with eyes and a brain could seriously dispute Nicholas Ray’s role as the primary auteur of Bigger Than Life. All you need to do is watch Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause and Bigger Than Life back-to-back to see that both films are the work of the same filmmaker, sharing a nearly identical approach to performance (pushed ... read more »

More than 20 years before Jacques Tourneur took us to an exotic tropical isle in 1943′s I Walked With a Zombie, his father, producer/director Maurice Tourneur (1876-1961), blazed a similar trail with his 1919 production of Victory.  Although most of his work is now lost, Tourneur’s reputation – confirmed by surviving stills and by images like the one ... read more »

Watching the marvelous Blu-ray edition of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), I was struck by how certain shots foreshadowed the imagery of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) released by the same studio, RKO, only four years later: the gothic castle at night with its one glowing window … … the outstretched hand ... read more »

Like Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin, Serbian–born Slavko Vorkapich (1894-1976) was not only a filmmaker, but a respected film theorist, and like those two Soviet giants, Vorkapich’s theories were mainly about editing – the right and wrong ways to cut two shots together, the “kinesthetic” (physical) effects that could be produced in the viewer through ... read more »

The amount of discussion generated by Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds demonstrates, if nothing else, that whether you like the film, hate it, or harbor mixed feelings about it, what Tarantino has created is some kind of movie. Unless you have been living in the proverbial cave – and I don’t mean Plato’s – you should ... read more »

Why Ten Days’ Wonder? I certainly wouldn’t call it one of Chabrol’s masterpieces. That’s a description I’d reserve for Les Bonnes Femmes, Le Boucher, Á Double Tour, La Rupture, The Cry of the Owl, Story of Women, La Cérémonie, or any one of a half dozen others. No, the reason I chose Ten Days’ Wonder ... read more »