Thousand Words: Evil Behind the Mask of Respectability (The Bad Sleep Well, 1960)
The Bad Sleep Well (Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru), a critical portrayal of postwar corporate Japan as a breeding ground…
Recent Posts
Four Frames: National Lampoon’s Vacation (Harold Ramis, 1983)
Many of us will no doubt recall the times we spent as a kid sat in the back of a…
Lost Classic: Hearts of Darkness (Bahr, Hickenlooper & Coppola, 1991)
The great French director Francois Truffaut won an Academy Award for Day For Night (1972), a behind the scenes look…
Screengem: The Plaster People in After Hours (Martin Scorsese, 1985)
At the root of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985) is a telling paradox: though the film chronicles a nightmarish, serpentine…
Thousand Words: A Journey into the Heart of Frontier America (The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, 2005)
Rancher Pete Perkins (Tommy Lee Jones) kidnaps Mike Norton (Barry Pepper), a young officer of the U.S. Border Patrol, who…
Fashion & Film: Penélope Cruz in Vicky Cristina Barcelona
It was not until I saw Penélope Cruz in Volver that I fully understood why she is Pedro Almódovar’s muse. Her ability…
Thousand Words: A Nightmare Called Belfast (’71, 2014)
In 1971, Private Gary Hook (Jack O’Connell), a young British soldier from Derbyshire, arrives in Belfast with his platoon. His…
Fashion & Film: Romy Schneider in Boccacio ’70
55 years ago, Boccaccio ’70 opened the fifteenth Cannes film festival. Modeled on Boccaccio’s The Decameron, the four short stories of…
Four Frames: The Element of Crime (Lars von Trier, 1984)
On paper, writer-director Lars von Trier and cowriter Niels Vørsel’s The Element of Crime (1984) is straight out of a…
