The Curse of the Cat People remains among the strangest Hollywood sequels ever made. Following Cat People, RKO’s 1942 horror masterwork of shadow and atmosphere that also helped delay the studio...

Cat People’s most brilliant moments were born out of the necessity for inventive filmmaking. Legendary producer Val Lewton, whose short-lived career at RKO in the 1940s realized some of classic Hollyw...

The Big Heat is a juicy and unflinching film noir whose brutal violence is matched by its sharp cynicism. In the film, a husband pulls his wife’s corpse from their blazing, bombed car. A twisted gangs...

Sansho the Bailiff (Sansho dayu, 1954) comes from an ancient folktale about a family separated and sold into slavery in eleventh century Japan. The film’s director, Kenji Mizoguchi, approaches the mat...

A mixture of social realism and otherworldly fantasy, Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu takes place during a time of civil war in sixteenth-century Japan. The director’s sweeping tale of earthly humanity and s...

“It figures it would be somethin’ like this,” says the hero of John Carpenter’s They Live. Nada, a homeless man named after the Spanish word for “nothing,” has just discovered an alien conspiracy. Whe...

In The Thin Blue Line, director Errol Morris investigates the wrongful conviction of Texan Randall Adams, who, in place of a more obvious suspect, was arrested for killing a police officer. Upon its r...

Environmentalist and self-appointed bear savior Timothy Treadwell shot most of the footage in Grizzly Man, yet the film is perhaps the finest and most characteristic of Werner Herzog’s documentaries. ...

Bicycle Thieves takes place at a very specific time under a unique series of social conditions that shape both its narrative and its embrace of the Neorealist message. Though its specificity may seem ...