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Once Were Warriors opens with an idyllic image of the New Zealand coast and the country’s natural, mythical beauty. In a familiar but no less effective visual device, the shot pulls back to reveal the...
The Guilty seems to exist so critics can use the word “taut” to describe its thrills. Indeed, this is the very definition of a taut thriller in the pull quote style of film criticism. It’s lean, effic...
Something about transitioning into middle age makes a person feel older, if only because the promise of youth was not so long ago. People entering their forties, or even late thirties, still feel conn...
Catch-22 rethought the notion of American heroes and wartime virtue for the counterculture movement of the 1960s. Americans think of World War II as a “Good War,” where its heroic boys fought wi...
Billy Madison is a film about the redemption of the soul. The 1995 comedy, starring Saturday Night Live alumnus Adam Sandler in his first big-screen showcase, grossed enough at the U.S. box office to ...
Giant is a film with an identity crisis. Made in the tradition of sweeping postwar epics designed to draw people away from their television sets and back into cinemas, the massive production was mount...
The cinema of revulsion is determined to cause the viewer feelings of nausea and disgust, the result of which shapes a moral perspective from unavoidable psychosomatic reactions. When the body has an ...
When it was released in 1951, A Place in the Sun boasted two of the era’s most attractive stars, Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor, in a motion picture that, despite its romantic surface, doubles ...
Get Carter is the volatile gangster film that solidified the British culture’s embrace of the genre. It came long before John Mackenzie’s The Long Good Friday (1980), Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa (1986), o...
