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...

George A Romero’s Night of the Living Dead birthed not only the zombie horror phenomenon but also the subsequent decades of exploitative, ultra-low-budget pictures hell-bent on scaring audiences out o...

Chronicling history by means of the Western, the one genre American cinema can claim to have pioneered, John Ford’s depiction of the West pumped with the blood of Manifest Destiny, the dreamy expressi...

In terms of classical storytelling, The Searchers, John Ford’s most compelling Western, avoids association with the genre’s established precepts. On the surface, Western form is obeyed to the mark: Th...