This piece naturally reveals the end of every film mentioned. You have been warned. What is most exciting about the pure joy of watching a Brian De Palma film usually comes as far away from subtext as one can get. Very few filmmakers can stage a major setpiece in their climax where the visceral excitement …
A sexy thief strips a woman of her golden underwear as her cohort collects them from the other side of the bathroom stall at Cannes. That the absurd, amusing, and schlocky sexuality of the opening heist in Femme Fatale comes from the mind of director Brian De Palma is hardly surprising.
Forty 1940s Films: ‘Detour’ Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer Starring Tom Neal, Ann Savage, and Edmund MacDonald USA, 67 min – 1945. “Money. You know what that is. It’s the stuff, you never have enough of. Little green things with George Washington’s picture that men slave for, commit crimes for, die for. It’s the stuff …
A man who works with his hands is a laborer; a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist. Louis Nizer In his indispensable film study text, Understanding Movies, Louis Gianetti held forth on …
It is arguable that women live in a “man’s world”. Women, it might also be argued, possess certain physical attributes of appeal to men that allow them considerable advantage under some circumstances. Such attributes coupled with certain behavioral subtleties often lay bare men’s weaknesses to a point where they seem compelled to act irrationally to …
The debut of a number of distinctive personalities is one of the important features of film noir. Noir’s main character, for instance, may appropriately be labeled thenoir loser. He is a handsome, middle-aged man who seems to blur the line between protagonist and antagonist. Billy Wilder has very explicitly introduced such personalities as Walter Neff …