Take a vacation from your humdrum daily life. The Hôtel de la Plage, an exquisite French resort, offers a sleepy beach, tennis courts, meals included, and your usual assemblage of civil, middle-class ...

Akira Kurosawa’s epic marks a convergence of art and entertainment that has never been surpassed in the history of filmmaking.

Perhaps the most elegant of all romantic comedy filmmakers, Ernst Lubitsch made blithe comedies about infidelity, satires on the struggle between desire and romantic idealism. To put it bluntly, Lubit...

Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels begins with the finale of another motion picture, a film within the film. On the screen, a young vagabond and a railway yard boss wrestle atop a speeding trai...

Manifest Destiny once signified the American persona and compelled settlers to cross punishing terrain in a professed duty of expansionism. On the pretense of a national movement, or perhaps a moral m...

Science-fiction is about creating intricate worlds and using those worlds to emphasize a discernible difference from our own. Whether the differences are political, societal, or technological, the gen...

François Truffaut called Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious “the quintessential Hitchcock film,” as if there could be just one. Truffaut’s wise assessment in the face of Hitchcock’s preeminent Psycho or Ver...

I will knock down the Gates of the Netherworld, I will smash the doorposts, and leave the doors flat down, and will let the dead go up to eat the living! And the dead will outnumber the living! —Epic ...

Mind and body cannot coexist. Each works according to its own set parameters, degenerating with time, never in unison. Oblivious to the body, the mind exists freely until it is forced to contemplate i...