Samuel Fuller made films about survivors. Whether they tromped through the perils of war and came out alive or faced up against one of society’s more menacing social problems, his brand of hard-boiled...

Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey does not require audiences to follow a story realized with dramatic character arcs and a traditional narrative structure, but rather it compels an elusive senso...

Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman made The Seventh Seal in 1957; however, its allegorical power has since ascended into the realm of timelessness. Closely developed from his one-act play Painting on Wo...

The maligned directorial history of Orson Welles offers an archetypal cautionary tale and horror story for other filmmakers to reflect upon and ultimately avoid. Welles stands in for every visionary d...

Movie Magic, however conceptual a notion, offers an understanding of how motion pictures converge from multiple points of artistic influence under the sometimes chaotic circumstances of their creation...

Vittorio De Sica’s Umberto D. envelops us in a seemingly futile search for dignity, within a hopeless, unsympathetic world almost incapable of recompense and riddled by indifference toward the individ...

Anthony Minghella’s Oscar-winning romance is a mysterious, yearning epic of the heart.

Melodrama should not be taken lightly or dismissed as trash, at least not when it applies to Douglas Sirk’s variety, and certainly not when considering Sirk’s wild and frothy Written on the Wind. His ...

Pregnant with social, humanist, and auteurist truths, Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion contains equal measures of humanism and realism. Beneath a World War I story about POW encampments, the great French ...