“Look upon me! I’ll show you the life of the mind!” proclaims John Goodman’s character in Barton Fink, Joel and Ethan Coen’s masterful hermetic comedy from 1991 about a playwright and would-be s...

David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. defies all waking, verbalized logic. Its audience must commit themselves to being dream detectives, a cinematic métier in which we are required to decipher cryptic d...

Star Wars belongs on a shortlist of important films that have been so saturated into our minds, so ingrained and present in our everyday culture, that watching the film now is almost an empty experien...

The perfect murder. So many cinematic killers have tried and failed to carry out a flawless crime. Watching them try usually proves to be an endurance test in suspense because their schemes seldom go ...

How fitting that David Fincher’s best film is about obsession

Night and the City opens with narration over shots of London at night. “Night and the city,” says an American voice. “The night is tonight, tomorrow night, or any night. The city is London.̶...

In 1981, New York City was not the beacon of hope and American unity post-9/11 society has raised it up to be; rather, violent urban dramas such as Death Wish (1974) and Taxi Driver (1976) reflected t...

Odd Man Out exists somewhere between realism and expressionism, between an almost documentary level exploration of the perceived real world and an emphatic, stylized one. The 1947 release, one of Caro...

Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park uses marvelous visuals to suspend its audience and characters in awe and revelation. Early in the film, a jeep of skeptical scientists and experts in their field...