By Theresa Rodewald. An unflinching depiction of the dying West and the violence inherent to the frontier….” Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) is a film shaped and defined by its past. Shot more than 50 years ago, its production was infamously fraught. Director Sam Peckinpah and […]
A Magnetic Mystery: David Lynch’s Lost Highway
By Jeremy Carr. Lynch at his storytelling best.” David Lynch can tell a pretty standard story when he wants to. While films like The Elephant Man (1980), Blue Velvet (1986), and The Straight Story (1999) surely have their moments of classically “Lynchian” eccentricity, their fundamental plots unfold along relatively orthodox […]
A Worthy Rediscovery: Bill Duke’s Deep Cover (Criterion Collection)
Bill Duke’s 1991 neo-noir Deep Cover finding a home at the Criterion Collection gives the film the communal artistic reverence that it has always richly deserved. And there lies the bittersweet taste of acceptance.” By Johnnie Hobbs III. “So gather ’round as I run it down, and unravel my pedigree…” […]
Reinforced Perspective: Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974)
By Jeremy Carr. Pakula adopts an accordingly striking compositional tension throughout the picture, isolating portions of the frame and dwarfing individuals in an abstract expanse, suggesting both a voyeuristic perspective and an unnerving environmental apprehension.” It might be hard to imagine now, but there was a time when being a […]
Buster Keaton’s Genius, Derailed: The Cameraman (Criterion Collection)
By Thomas Gladysz. Film history is littered with the stories of stars whose careers were derailed by their studios, and themselves. Orson Welles and Erich von Stroheim are two of the best known examples. Each saw their careers go off the tracks for reasons that had as much to do […]
A Western by Any Other Name: Destry Rides Again (Criterion Collection)
By Jeremy Carr. There is, first and most famously, Marlene Dietrich. Since the time of its premiere in 1939, to its latest reemergence in the form of a Criterion Collection Blu-ray, conversation concerning Destry Rides Again has inevitably, and quite justly, hinged on the presence of this beguiling, Berlin-born beauty. […]