Night and the City (1950), directed by Jules Dassin and starring Richard Widmark, is the compelling story of a hoodlum on the make in postwar London. Andrew Pulver's study of the …
A new kind of film emerged from Hollywood in the early 1940s, thrillers that derived their plots from the hard-boiled school of crime fiction but with a style all their own. …
The 1940 film adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s gothic romance Rebecca begins by echoing the novel’s famous opening line, ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.’ Patricia …
Grey Gardens (1975) is one of most important documentary films of the past thirty years, gaining the status of a cult classic. Matthew Tinkcom argues that the film reshaped …
Rosemary’s Baby is one of the greatest movies of the late 1960s and one of the best of all horror movies, an outstanding modern Gothic tale. An art-house fable and an elegant …
This text looks at one of the masterpieces of French cinema, made under great difficulties during the German occupation in World War II, and set in the world of 19th-century …
Citizen Kane's reputation as one of the greatest films of all time is matched only by the accumulation of critical commentary that surrounds it. What more can there be to say about …
The Empire Strikes Back (1980), the second film in the original Star Wars trilogy, is often cited as the ‘best’ and most popular Star Wars movie. In her compelling study, Rebecca …
Vampyr is a problematic film, partly because some of it is lost. But in what remains, there are problems too. In a reading as passionate as it is analytic, a veteran dramatist and …
First released in 1987, Near Dark is a vampire film set in the contemporary American Midwest that tells the story of Caleb, a half-vampire trying to decide whether to embrace his …
