In the 1960s, French president Charles de Gaulle made a vow to develop his country’s economy and reform Paris into a modern city. Knocking down older houses in urban Right Bank districts, develo...

While they sleep, San Francisco residents are being infiltrated by an other-worldly threat that replicates them into emotionless clones. All of their liberalism and culture is stripped away as they be...

Metropolis contains such magnificent visuals that all else about the film recedes, allowing its all-consuming mythical status to take over. A technical masterwork of the Silent Era by Austrian directo...

The Coen Brothers’ The Man Who Wasn’t There has a perfect film noir opening, a monologue in voiceover that captures its protagonist’s unaffected, yet exacting, observations about his métier, his famil...

Few films have followed Western traditions with as much exhilarating craftsmanship, narrative and stylistic economy, or sheer escapist delight as Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo. The picture is a prescr...

Westerns often take well-known episodes of American history and build them up into iconographic films, but few are more tightly rooted in history and the experience of the West than Howard Hawks’...

The truth lies between lines of testimony in Rashomon, Akira Kurosawa’s philosophical tale whose enduring influence can be measured by the spread of Japanese cinema across the globe and its impa...

On the surface, The Thin Man is about retired detective Nick Charles, played by the debonair William Powell, who investigates a missing person’s case and, in due course, solves a twisting, almost inco...

Gal Dove’s Spanish hacienda is a place of leisure. He sunbathes poolside like a lizard roasting on a desert rock, his skin achingly tan and leathered, his movements plodding. The heat burns so good. “...