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Orwellian Realities
FilmStruck has five titles available to view as part of a Behind the Iron Curtain theme. I originally set out to write about Barbara (2012) as it’s an interesting and unfairly overlooked gem dealing...
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Faceoff: Sabotage vs. Foreign Correspondent
It’s that time of year when I ask students to select one or more Hitchcock films as part of the course material in my upper level film history class. I like to offer a pre-WWII Hitchcock film as one...
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Bop Gun: Black Sun (1964)
With La La Land nominated for fourteen Academy Award nominations and likely to dominate movie chatter in the coming weeks, I wanted to track down some lesser known uses of jazz on film, for those...
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Le Bonheur (1965): Find Your Happy Place
Do you have a film you love even though you can’t point to a specific reason why? A title that just seems to envelop you from the opening frames and keeps you enthralled without doing anything showy?...
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My Melancholy Valentine: Dans Paris (2006)
Love is complicated. Some see it as a priceless gift or blessing while others describe it as an unshakeable disease. It can be comforting, enriching, elevating, thrilling and divine. It can also be...
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Talking Heads: My Dinner with Andre (1981)
Last week, I delved into documentaries and asked how much was real and how much was fiction. Specifically, I was looking for the appearance of reality and wondering if documentaries and their overlap...
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Irma, I Love You, But You’re Breaking My Heart
When I decided to write about Billy Wilder’s Irma La Douce (1963) for this week’s StreamLine piece, I originally intended to argue on the film’s behalf. In discussions of “lesser Wilder films” Irma La...
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Part Doc, Part Comedy, All Sex
Did you know that the energy harnessed by orgasm is the same energy responsible for the Northern Lights? No? Well, perhaps you are unfamiliar with the Orgone, an energy that exists everywhere and in...
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Things to Come (1936): William Cameron Menzies’s Biggest Headache
I am teaching a section on mise-en-scene later this semester, and I am going to use stills and clips from the 1936 sci-fi classic Things to Come, which is adapted from H.G. Wells’ The Shape of Things...
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Mad Love: Beauty and the Beast (1946)
\Next month Disney will release their live action adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, starring Emma Watson and Dan Stevens. It is sure to be sumptuous and well-appointed and all that, but it’s...
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Shake Your Bones with The Living Skeleton (1968)
Now that another Valentine’s Day has passed, it’s time to focus on other emotions out there… like stark terror! Pretty much impossible for American audiences to see until 2012 apart from its very...
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Everyone’s Gone Crazy: Violent Cop (1989)
“Beat” Takeshi Kitano has been making headlines recently. Late last year the 70-year-old Japanese filmmaker, actor, author and entertainer was awarded France’s coveted Legion of Honor for his...
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A Relic from the Past: Gas Food Lodging (1992)
When people think of old movies, they think black and white, grainy, studio-driven and set bound. It’s a common go-to for most casual movie fans but for a film lover, there are no old movies, only...
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I (Don’t Really) Know Where I’m Going!
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going! (1945) is a lovely, simple tale of stubborn self-confidence, the unexpected nature of life and unlikely romance. Wendy Hiller, known...
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A Surrealist Anti-Nationalist for All Ages – And All Countries.
Luis Buñuel died in 1983 at 83 of cirrhosis of the liver in a hospital in Mexico City. The Spanish-born filmmaker was famous, in part, for being fearless in his critiques of organized religion and the...
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Before James Bond, There was Bulldog Drummond
As might be expected, the first big-screen detective was Sherlock Holmes, who appeared in Sherlock Holmes Baffled for American Biograph in 1900. Sherlock has enjoyed a long run on the big screen,...
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Coup d’etat: The Embassy (1973)
There is a coup d’etat in an unnamed country, and a group of dissenting artists and intellectuals pour into an embassy, seeking asylum. Chris Marker’s The Embassy (1973) is a provocative short film,...
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Keep an Eye Out for The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe (1972)
For reasons known only to the movie gods, Hollywood embarked on a decades-long love affair with the idea of grabbing the rights to successful French-language comedies and remaking them for American...
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A Double Dose of Boris Karloff
Life has been throwing me lots of curveballs lately and when I’m feeling low, I tend to gravitate towards what I like to call “comfort food films” and my comfort food tends to be classic horror films....
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La Jetée (1963) and the Big Reveal
One of my favorite sci-fi movies of the last year was the Oscar nominated Arrival(2016). When I watched it, I was reminded how much the big reveal has become a part of modern science fiction. Being a...
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