When Richard Linklater was in second grade, he became enthralled by the historical moment that was happening right in his Houston backyard as NASA prepared for the Apollo moon landing. Decades la...
When German director Douglas Sirk fled the Nazis in 1937 and planted his flag in Hollywood, he quickly became a reliable studio craftsman equally adept at war films (Hitler’s Madman, Mystery Su...
My first recommendations this week are two Blu-rays that are worth picking up not just because they’re terrific movies, but because they come with superb audio commentaries packed with useful i...
In the 1940s, actress Ida Lupino was one of Warner Bros.’ most reliable contract players, a performer who exuded a tough intelligence in terse genre movies like High Sierra and They Drive by Ni...
From its opening shot of a curtain rising on a London cityscape to its climactic revelation that an earlier flashback sequence was a lie, Stage Fright (1950) is one of director Alfred Hitchcock�...
Walter Mirisch is best remembered today as the producer of studio prestige releases like In the Heat of the Night, The Apartment, and the original West Side Story, but before he became one of Hol...
1992 was a year of high points for filmmaker Ernest Dickerson, who ended his career as a director of photography with Spike Lee’s majestic bio-pic Malcolm X and began life as a feature film dir...
Director Mark Pellington has long been one of the American cinema’s great chroniclers of grief, from early genre films like The Mothman Prophecies (in which the horror story is a vehicle for an...
Compiling my annual list of the year’s ten best Blu-ray releases (or, to be more accurate, my ten personal favorites), I have come to the conclusion once again that reports of the death of phys...
In the new Netflix film Mixtape, 12-year-old Beverly (Gemma Brooke Allen) tries to learn about her late parents by tracking down the songs they loved, a task made difficult by the pre-iTunes and ...
Writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber makes movies that are so impeccably crafted and deliriously funny that it’s easy to take them for granted; like the classical Hollywood directors of the ...
Barry Sonnenfeld was less than ten years into a successful career as a cinematographer—with credits including Blood Simple, Raising Arizona and When Harry Met Sally on his resume—when he sat...
Among graduates of the “Roger Corman film school,” Jonathan Kaplan doesn’t have the same level of name recognition as Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, or Francis Coppola, but he clearly lea...
Gus Van Sant’s 1989 masterpiece Drugstore Cowboy is one of the seminal films of its era, a movie both timeless and completely of its time; like the 1940s noir pictures it echoes and expands upo...
When screenwriter, director, producer, actor, novelist, stock options trader, playwright, musician, newspaper columnist and gallery artist Melvin Van Peebles died last week at the age of 89, he l...
In the summer of 1997, a season characterized by gargantuan spectacles like The Lost World, Con Air, The Fifth Element, and Batman and Robin, a modest thriller by an unknown young director surpri...
Since the moment 4K discs hit the market, the Star Trek movies have been among sci-fi fans’ most eagerly anticipated titles. This week the first four have finally arrived on the format in the �...
British director Lewis Gilbert is largely forgotten today, but in his heyday he helmed a number of classic films ranging from comedy (the 1966 Alfie, which made Michael Caine a star) and war film...
Ever since his directorial debut with The Indian Runner in 1991, Sean Penn has been intent on keeping a certain tradition of American cinema alive: the tradition of directorially self-effacing, b...
Barbara Crampton has been acting in horror movies for almost 40 years now and has classics like Body Double and Re-animator on her resume (alongside more recent cult favorites such as Lords of Sa...