Let me report simply that A Clockwork Orange manifests itself on the screen as a painless, bloodless, and ultimately pointless futuristic fantasy.
If anybody is looking for a film which will embody and reinforce his worst moments of panic, it is available in Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange.
In this essay, Michael Klein elucidates the unique nature of Kubrick’s modernist perspective, as evinced in Barry Lyndon
Once Upon a Time in the West is Sergio Leone’s most American Western, but it is still dominantly and paradoxically European in spirit, at one and the same time Christian and Marxist, despairing and exultant, nihilistic and regenerative.
Apocalypse Now achieved its highest aspiration: Not only was it immersed in the historical period and place – Vietnam – but it was an allegory of people facing reality and truth.
Charlie, who represents to such an extraordinary degree the whole human race caught in its habitual rattrap, does kick off his shoes, and we are abundantly convinced of the validity of his gesture of invincibility.
The Elephant Man is a very pleasurable surprise. Though I had seen Eraserhead, which is the only other feature directed by David Lynch, and had thought him a true original, I wasn’t prepared for the strength he would bring out of understatement.
I kept my eyes wide open all through Eyes Wide Shut and saw more control-freak unreality than visual genius around the edges of the cluttered compositions.
Stanley Kubrick’s film Barry Lyndon, spectacular as it is, flies in the face of an audience’s usual expectations about “costume drama” as a cinematic form of historical fiction.
Paul Verhoeven has returned home to Holland for his latest film, Black Book, the harrowing story of a young Jewish woman who finds herself thrown by circumstance into the resistance against the Nazis, where she is asked to pose as a sexy cabaret singer in order to get close to Holland’s head of the SS
The movie works because it has the Mary Shelley story to lean on: we know that the monster will be created and will get loose. And Brooks makes a leap up as a director because, although the comedy doesn’t build, he carries the story through.
Throughout the three hours and twenty minutes of Part II, there are so many moments of epiphany — mysterious, reverberant images, such as the small Vito singing in his cell — that one scarcely has the emotional resources to deal with the experience of this film.
It is hard to think of a recent American film which has been as classically and persistently misread as The Deer Hunter.
La Grande Illusion is a perceptive study of human needs and the subtle barriers of class among a group of prisoners and their captors during World War I.
The following interview, conducted by Larry French in preparation for his forthcoming book on the films of Roger Corman, centers around that very fruitful period in Price’s career.
Both Kubrick and King merit congratulations for making The Shining one of the most overpowering experiences of horror ever committed to celluloid. It manages to treat intangible, elusive subjects—ghosts, demons, spirits and the like—as if they were as real as this morning’s headlines.
The thaw in the Soviet Union made it possible for new filmmakers, although not without difficulty, to assert their personal vision. The most striking of these was indisputably Andrei Tarkovsky, Emmanuel Carrère discusses the grandeur of Stalker.
by Pauline Kael In Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands, the towers and spires of a medieval castle rise high in the air right out of the
A special advance look at The Keep, a new $11 million horror offering, directed by Michael Mann.
Jonathan Cott interviews Federico Fellini for Rolling Stone magazine. The conversation took place in the director’s office in Rome, February 1984
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