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...

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...