Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman made The Seventh Seal in 1957; however, its allegorical power has since ascended into the realm of timelessness. Closely developed from his one-act play Painting on Wo...

The maligned directorial history of Orson Welles offers an archetypal cautionary tale and horror story for other filmmakers to reflect upon and ultimately avoid. Welles stands in for every visionary d...

Movie Magic, however conceptual a notion, offers an understanding of how motion pictures converge from multiple points of artistic influence under the sometimes chaotic circumstances of their creation...

Vittorio De Sica’s Umberto D. envelops us in a seemingly futile search for dignity, within a hopeless, unsympathetic world almost incapable of recompense and riddled by indifference toward the individ...

Built layer by breathless layer, The English Patient has no need to construct its story according to chronology. From the labyrinthine novel by Michael Ondaatje, writer-director Anthony Minghella adap...

Melodrama should not be taken lightly or dismissed as trash, at least not when it applies to Douglas Sirk’s variety, and certainly not when considering Sirk’s wild and frothy Written on the Wind. His ...

Pregnant with social, humanist, and auteurist truths, Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion contains equal measures of humanism and realism. Beneath a World War I story about POW encampments, the great French ...

Kanji Watanabe toils as a paltry Section Chief at the Public Affairs division in City Hall, stamping forms and adding to towers of endless paperwork, wrapping himself in departmental red tape. Appropr...

The director presides over a film, overseeing the creative flow of motion picture production. Savoring his control and minimizing the collaborative aspects of filmmaking, Alfred Hitchcock relished the...