Tod Browning’s Freaks endures as one of the strangest curiosities ever put to celluloid, a film that tests our initial repulsion and challenges our basic human sympathies. Released by Metro-Goldwyn-Ma...

Nicolas Roeg’s Gothic tale Don’t Look Now writhes with uncertainty, a vagueness that underlines everything revealed to intensify our unease. And yet, this feeling becomes prey to a confident, ingeniou...

As hobbies go, surveying trains and collecting detailed, personalized information about them resides in a unique class of lowly pastimes. And aside from train-bejeweled wallpaper, the activity has no ...

Gone with the Wind is a historical film in every sense of the word. The story, adapted from Margaret Mitchell’s beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning 1936 novel, delves into a romantic period of American his...

“Scorpion wants to cross a river, but he can’t swim. Goes to the frog, who can, and asks for a ride. Frog says, ‘If I give you a ride on my back, you’ll go and sting me.’ Scorpion replies, ‘It would n...

Answering for the violent thrills of Yojimbo, Akira Kurosawa’s sequel Sanjuro modifies its predecessor’s structure and, in a way, condemns its eponymous hero, reprised by Toshiro Mifune, by depicting ...

Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo begins with a ronin, a masterless samurai who wanders here and there, making a living by his sword, at a literal crossroads. By chance, the unkempt samurai chooses a path to a...

One has to wonder if newspapermen like the ones in His Girl Friday ever existed, or if the films like these created the stereotype. You know the sort: fast-talking, hard-nosed reporters willing to do ...

Brian De Palma’s Blow Out begins with a slick sequence from a killer’s point of view, similar to the subjective opening in John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978). A voyeuristic, heavy-breathing killer watc...