“Lucid, lively and extremely knowledgeable.” Sight & Sound Catherine Fowler’s study positions Jeanne Dielman as a ‘contrary’ classic, its contrariness arising from director Chantal …
Despite being one of Andrei Tarkovsky's most successful films, Solaris (1972) was the one he most disliked. This dismissal of his most generically marked film has often been …
Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes) is and perhaps always will be Werner Herzog's most important film. Appearing in 1972, Aguirre put Herzog on the map of world …
Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette, 1948) is unarguably one of the most important films in the history of cinema. It is also one of the most beguiling, moving and (apparently) …
Blackmail was the first major British sound film. Tom Ryall examines its unusual production history, and places it in the context of Hitchcock's other British films of the period. …
The first computer-generated animated feature film, Toy Story (1995) sustains a dynamic vitality that appeals to audiences of all ages. This lively study explores how its depiction …
Alan J. Pakula's The Parallax View (1974) is a renowned example of the paranoid conspiracy thriller, a genre that was a marker of the 1970s. The period was haunted by the murders …
This is the first single study of Douglas Sirk's 1956 film Written on the Wind, a melodrama about an alcoholic playboy who marries the woman his best friend secretly loves. Peter …
On the face of it, Gabriel Axel's Babette's Feast (1989) is a film in which the eyes – and mouths – of religious zealots are opened to the glories of the sensual world. It is a …
Paul Schrader was in meltdown in 1972. Drinking heavily, living in his car, he was hospitalised with a gastric ulcer. There he read about Arthur Bremer's attempt to assassinate …
