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The Monster Is Loose: Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan as a Parable of Putin’s Russia?
Russian cinema has always commanded international respect, even when things were frosty between the Soviet Union and the ‘West.’ The same still holds true for the modern arthouse movies from the country. Since the early 2000s, Andrei Zvyagintsev has become one of the more distinguished Russian directors. Particularly because of the recent crisis between his […]
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Back in the U.S.S.R.: William Hurt Investigates Soviet-Style in Michael Apted’s Gorky Park
For half of a century, the Soviet Union was the one big enemy of all Western countries as well as a welcome antagonist in a myriad of books, movies, and television shows. Portraits of the socialist empire were usually fairly one-sided and sketchy. It was the time of the Cold War, after all, and the […]
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Money for Nothing: Martin Scorsese Makes Leonardo DiCaprio The Wolf Of Wall Street
After some rather unconventional career choices lately, Martin Scorsese has finally returned to the world he knows best – that of the real-life gangsters transported to the big screen. For The Wolf Of Wall Street, he has also brought back his favorite actor of the last decade and a half, Leonardo DiCaprio. This time, however, […]
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Basket Case: James Stewart Defends Ben Gazzara in Otto Preminger’s Anatomy Of A Murder
James ‘Jimmy’ Stewart is one of Hollywood’s most beloved actors of all time. His noteworthy movies range from an Oscar-winning performance in Frank Capra’s The Philadelphia Story to becoming an Alfred Hitchcock’s favorite in Rear Window and Vertigo. After ‘Hitch’ had infamously ditched him for Cary Grant on North By Northwest, James Stewart managed to […]
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Devils & Dust: The Corruption of Nicolas Cage in John Dahl’s Red Rock West
Remember when Nicolas Cage was one of the more respected actors of the Hollywood family? It may appear like eons ago, but in the 1990s, he had a remarkable run of movies that worked and increased his reputation. Nicolas Cage couldn’t do any wrong – or so it seemed. He had the male starring role […]
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Excess All Areas: ‘Deflowering’ the Disney Girls in Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers
You can probably say an awful lot of things about Harmony Korine but not that the man has ever shied away from controversy. In fact, he seems to embrace it, at least occasionally. In 1996, the American filmmaker stormed the Hollywood landscape when he wrote the semi-autobiographical screenplay for Larry Clark’s disturbing Kids. His own […]
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A Little Bit of Finger: Chicken and Other Assorted Goodies in The Bone Man
Austrian films have been the secret stars of the German-speaking landscape in recent years, not just because of the eccentric Michael Haneke and his Oscar-winning drama Amour. In artistic terms, many of these usually indie pictures have outperformed the more expensive productions from the bigger neighboring country. Lately, one of the mainstays of Austrian cinema […]
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The Millionaire Waltz: Rekindling the ‘Roaring Twenties’ in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby
With his leading role in Baz Luhrmann’s modern version of Romeo & Juliet, Leonardo DiCaprio burst onto the Hollywood scene in grand style in 1996. So when the news spread that the charismatic superstar and the director of the Oscar-winning musical Moulin Rouge! would reunite for an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel The […]
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Private Investigations: The Birth of the Hard-boiled Detective in John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon
Nowadays, devious investigators must be considered an integral part of the Hollywood repertoire. That wasn’t always the case. Their archetype is a guy named Sam Spade, who first appeared on the big screen in 1941. At the time, the character created by writer Dashiell Hammett had already been immensely popular as the hero of the […]
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Through the Looking-Glass: Why Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver Remains an Important Movie
Movies in which persons stare at themselves in the mirror or talk to themselves are a dime a dozen in the world of today. Yet there aren’t too many iconic characters in modern Hollywood, or in contemporary cinema in general, especially not too many polarizing figures inspired by real life. Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle, […]
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The (Not So) Simple Art of Murder: Seamless Editing and Friedrich Nietzsche Revisited in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope
Everybody knows – or has at least heard of – Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpieces. Rear Window, Vertigo, North By Northwest, Psycho, and The Birds, these names ring a bell with anybody who’s at least somewhat interested in cinema. Yet the English ‘Master of Suspense’ has created so many more wonderful movies, and film buffs still love […]
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Holy Water: The Sinister Los Angeles of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown
If you thought film noir was long dead and gone, think twice. The genre – if you can even call it that – has never vanished from the landscape. The rumors about its demise have been largely exaggerated – for the simple reason that there have been many noteworthy classics since the heyday of film […]
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Eyes of a Stranger: Voyeurism and Horror in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom
Norman Bates from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is universally regarded as the quintessential movie psychopath. Nowadays, he’s simply an indispensable member of the greatest onscreen characters of all time. Psycho’s importance becomes obvious when we consider that its filming is about to become the topic of a feature called Hitchcock by Sacha Gervasi with Anthony Hopkins, […]
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Caught in a Web: The Virtual Reality of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s World On A Wire
‘Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?’ the British band Queen asked at the beginning of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Freddie Mercury’s legendary opus magnum. A similar question has also been posed in the realm of cinema several times. What’s real and what’s a dream or, in the case of modern technology, a computer simulation? […]