directed by Billy Wilder Billy Wilder’s 1960 Best Picture winner succeeds as a comedy (and as a romance) because of its willingness to grapple with things that are brutally sad. Jack Lemmon stars as Baxter, a lonely corporate cog who...
directed by Howard Hawks The bantering romantic comedy that all subsequent bantering romantic comedies aspire to be. Based on Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s play The Front Page, Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday is a paragon of most of the...
Back when DVDs with special features were first becoming a thing, one of my greatest joys was watching deleted scenes. As a preteen who was just starting to cultivate an interest in film, anything I could learn about any movie...
Virtually all movies are in some way a time capsule. Even if they’re period pieces, or take place in some outlandish fictional universe wildly different from our own, they can still serve as telling snapshots of time in which they...
There’s a great line in Michael Lehmann’s Heathers in which Ms. Fleming, the well-intentioned but ultimately clueless high school guidance counselor, says that “whether or not to kill yourself is one of the most important decisions a teenager can make.” One of...
A Coffee In Berlin is shot in black and white, and takes place over the course of a single day in the life of an unemployed young man named Niko. Its modest scope and low-key visual style create a weird, but...
Chris Mason Johnson’s Test is a perfect example of the maxim that specificity is the soul of narrative. Set in San Francisco in 1985, and populated almost entirely by artistically inclined, sexually promiscuous gay men, Test is very firmly grounded in a specific time,...
Stan Brooks, director of the new film Perfect Sisters, has had a long and prolific career as a producer of made-for-TV movies, many of which were inspired by true events. This new film, his first as director, is much the same....
Leslie Greif’s 10 Rules For Sleeping Around claims in its opening credits to have been inspired by the 1969 stage farce Move Over, Mrs. Markham. While Greif’s film is positively boiling over with the superficial trappings of the genre – slamming...
It’s difficult to find a more apt word for Jonathan Glazer’s sci-fi drama Under The Skin than “alienating.” Believe me, I tried – I’m well aware that when you’re dealing with a film about a literal alien, employing that particular adjective is...
