In the days preceding his son’s bar mitzvah, Jewish physics professor Larry Gopnik endures a series of misfortunes that, in their entirety, would drive anyone to madness. To find some rationale for hi...

Certain elements of storytelling are left to chance in live-action filmmaking. An actor improvises a line; natural light shifts to change the meaning of a scene; the cameraman embraces a moment of spo...

After following two forest spirits down the proverbial rabbit hole, Mei, a four-year-old girl complete with pigtails and endless curiosity, comes upon a massive clearing at the base of a conifer tree....

Compare today’s average romantic comedy to the work of the genre’s most celebrated practitioner, Preston Sturges, and it becomes tragically clear that something crucial has been lost in the genre over...

How strange that the The Wolf Man, released by Universal Pictures in 1941, contains no monster at all. Certainly Lon Chaney Jr. endured hours in the makeup chair so that his character, Larry Talbot, w...

Much has been put forward about Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and its meaning. Travis Bickle, Robert De Niro’s loner New York City cabbie, has been called an attack on the failed deliverance promised ...

A three-ring circus of his own cinematic tropes, Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus reclaims and redefines the director’s reputation in the modern age, using a carnival of imagery roo...

City Lights may be Charles Chaplin’s most personal motion picture, or perhaps the film’s heightened measure of emotion just makes it feel that way. Where else except someplace dear could a filmmaker d...

Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report realizes the full potential of author Philip K. Dick’s science-fiction worldview, a perspective filled with dangerous technology, feverish paranoia, and metaphysical...