Chronicling history by means of the Western, the one genre American cinema can claim to have pioneered, John Ford’s depiction of the West pumped with the blood of Manifest Destiny, the dreamy expressi...

In terms of classical storytelling, The Searchers, John Ford’s most compelling Western, avoids association with the genre’s established precepts. On the surface, Western form is obeyed to the mark: Th...

Opening on a boy torturing cockroaches in the street, The Wages of Fear’s first shot expounds the entire film. Deprived, the child suddenly follows after a shaved-ice merchant pushing his cart and ann...

Asymmetrical in form, he cuts a distinctive figure. His derby hat rests upon his head at an angle, its slant accentuated by the straightness of his suspenders and the forced lines of his tight-buttone...

Anthony Mann made Westerns. He experimented in other genres, of course, honing his technical skills on atmospheric 1940s film noir pictures such as T-Men (1947) and Border Incident (1949) and dabbling...

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade deviates from the full-blown Saturday serial adventure formula so jealously adhered to by its predecessors. While keeping our basic escapist moviegoing desires sooth...

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom moves beyond simply replicating the adventure formula of its predecessor, Raiders of the Lost Ark. Instead, it takes Harrison Ford’s archeologist-adventurer hero I...

Every frame of Raiders of the Lost Ark contains an enduring iconography, not only because from scene to scene the picture surges with nonstop energy and craft, but because the production embraces a pa...

In the darkness loom horrible unknowns from our nightmares or from the blackest regions of our imagination, and in such unthinkable obscurity is where horror derives its greatest power. These fears re...