From the late 1960s to early 1970s and beyond, Zodiac Killer hysteria rattled the San Francisco Bay Area of northern California. With several confirmed attacks and numerous others attributed to his na...

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...

A wall of vehicles manned by post-apocalyptic marauders has lined up outside of the compound, headed by their hockey-masked leader, The Humungus. All at once, a semi-truck pulling a tanker of gas emer...

In the last great film by Preston Sturges, the writer-director’s signature wit and slapstick come together with an hysterical sense of the macabre, forming a comedy far ahead of its time. And ye...

To achieve the opening shots of Aguirre, the Wrath of God, director Werner Herzog sought a location atop a mountain near Machu Picchu, in Peru. He led his cast and crew, some 450 people, along with a ...

Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ opens with a dream sequence that embodies the entire picture as few first scenes have. In the sequence, troubled filmmaker Guido Anselmi, a clear representation of Fellini himse...