Spirituality has never had a more unlikely ally than William Friedkin’s enduring shocker The Exorcist. No matter the belief system of the viewer, the film’s haunting and ingeniously crafted verisimili...

A crystalline object fills the screen, surrounded by blackness and the mere impression of similar shapes around it. Reverberating layered strings carry a persistent banshee cry under the image, the sh...

Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line should not be seen as much as experienced through the perception of flowing images and existential questioning. Set in the Pacific during World War II, Malick’s wor...

Few motion pictures have captured the frenzied power of obsession with as much veracity as Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. Just as the film portrays a mad enthusiast determined to build an opera house i...

Sergio Leone’s Westerns radiate pure style. All other elements, including narrative, remain residuary by-products of that style. Informed by the Italian director’s obsession with aesthetics, his extra...

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes spearheaded the notion that cinema and dance, through mediums of expression with varied modus operandi, could coalesce in a singular form. Through...

Colonel Blimp began in 1934 as the subject of reactionary British cartoonist David Low. Satirizing stuffy military and political forces from his era, Low’s cartoon ran in London’s Evening Standard, wh...

In both its narrative and production, the basis of Pixar’s Toy Story contains an intriguing metaphor whereby the film mirrors Pixar itself. The animation studio employs computers, inanimate and seemin...

In 1962, when stopped at the German border to leave his home country of Poland, where he would not return for nearly twenty years, Roman Polanski had hardly any possessions with which to impress custo...