Halloween is John Carpenter’s most analyzed work. Spectators have drawn sundry conclusions about its meaning and symbolism since its initial release, and the obsession has lingered for decades. Horror...

Rosemary’s Baby builds tension with masterful patience and detail, not because it relies entirely on the payoff of its devilish finale, but because Roman Polanski wants to submerge the viewer in paran...

In The Music Room, Satyajit Ray looks back at the relationship between a patrician class and their music, which was about to vanish from Indian culture in the post-independence drive toward modernizat...

Satyajit Ray’s The Big City (Mahanagar, 1963) explores the specificity of human subjects in their world, the lower-middle-class sections of what is today Kolkata. The story is, on the surface, a simpl...

Satyajit Ray made films about how people in India negotiate their surroundings and culture. His boundless humanism defined his work, which began in 1955 with Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road),...

Seated on a beer barrel, the scantily clad Lola Lola appears in black regalia, a top hat tilted to one side, her arms bare, her skirt dangling from her upper thighs as she leans back slightly, holding...

Only Chaplin could have made The Great Dictator in 1940, during a period in Hollywood when a motion picture against Nazism was considered a commercial and political risk. In the years after Adolf Hitl...

Brad Bird made The Incredibles to appeal to everyone, but the film offers more for adults than its presumed target audience, children. To be sure, most Pixar Animation Studios releases connect with vi...

In a bastion of artistry and intellectual seriousness, Schrader engages the problem of Mishima and provides an answer through extravagant, thoughtful filmmaking.