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‘The Abyss’: James Cameron’s Exploration of Humanity and Love in the Heart of...
Having made The Terminator (1984) and Aliens (1986), two huge box office hits and pillars of modern Hollywood science fiction action films, James Cameron could have shot any kind of a film his heart...
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Ballad for an Iron Coffin: Wolfgang Petersen’s ‘Das Boot’
You never see the enemy. Like Christopher Nolan’s triptych timeline suspenser Dunkirk, both quarry and hunter/guardians of the Allied Atlantic convoys our unterseeboot protagonists wrestle with, appear...
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‘Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia’: The Story of the Great Sam Peckinpah’s...
Before Warner Bros. decided to take a chance and hire him to make The Wild Bunch, the classic revisionist western that would completely revitalize his career, Sam Peckinpah was laboring on television,...
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‘Out of the Past’: The Quintessential Film Noir that Launched Robert Mitchum...
Seventy years since its release, Out of the Past has long enjoyed an established place in film historians’ lectures on the best examples of film noir. Produced by RKO, a company which mainly...
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Terrence Malick’s ‘The Thin Red Line’: The Traumatic and Poetic Journey into...
Twenty years have passed between Days of Heaven, Terrence Malick’s second feature film, and The Thin Red Line, his great 1998 comeback, the third film in a rich, influential and thoroughly unique...
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‘Catch-22′: Mike Nichols’ Underappreciated Classic Adaptation of One of the...
It had all the ingredients of an instant hit and future classic. At the helm, one of the hottest directorial commodities of the period, the great Mike Nichols, just coming off his successes with Who’s...
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The Faustian Fall Guy: Richard Rush’s ‘The Stunt Man’
You’ve got to admire an opening sequence where an unconcerned, lazy dog lies in the middle of a dusty side road, obstructing a Sheriff’s patrol car by licking its own balls. The camera pans to a...
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‘Touch of Evil’: Orson Welles’ Grandiose Film Noir that Took Four Decades to...
When Universal approached Orson Welles with an intriguing supporting role in a new thriller tentatively called Badge of Evil, the filmmaker was at a difficult point of his career, not having directed...
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‘Unforgiven’: Clint Eastwood’s Eulogy for the Man with No Name in His...
Two years after Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves became only the second Western ever to win the Best Picture Academy Award, the first being Cimarron in 1931, a revisionist Western called Unforgiven...
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‘The Train’: John Frankenheimer’s Monumental Tribute to Wartime Railway...
There’s a probably apocryphal quote attributed to Winston Churchill in WWII, in which the man of Britain’s finest hour insisted that the arts must be funded, “otherwise, what are we fighting for?” John...
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‘Thief’: How Michael Mann’s Cinema Debut Stole the World’s Attention
When Michael Mann’s Thief hit theaters in March 1981, the critics rushed to praise the filmmaker’s feature debut, expressing surprise at the fact such an inexperienced director could deliver a movie so...
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‘Predator’: John McTiernan’s First Studio Gig that Became an Epic Action Classic
After Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky IV proved to be a huge box office hit back in 1985, earning more than 300 million dollars on a 28-million investment, a funny joke started circulating around Hollywood:...
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Peter Weir’s ‘Witness’: A Deep, Subtle and Complex Social Comment Disguised...
One of the main figures of the Australian New Wave, Peter Weir, earned the attention of the film-appreciating community with such films as the mystery drama Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), the renowned...
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Intention Is Everything: Christopher McQuarrie’s ‘The Way of the Gun’
Christopher McQuarrie’s directorial debut after his Oscar-winning screenplay success with The Usual Suspects (1995), The Way of the Gun (2000) is most often described as one of the best little action...
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‘The Last of the Mohicans’: Michael Mann’s Riveting Love Story as the...
After a string of successes on television, having made a name for himself on projects such as Starsky and Hutch and Police Story, Michael Mann turned to directing films. The TV movie called The Jericho...
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Paul Hirsch on ‘Star Wars’: Thinking We Were Making a Film for Kids, We Made...
An unusually calm, composed and quiet man sits across the table from me and my notebook, patiently awaiting my next question. We’re in Poland: it’s that time of the year when the city of Bydgoszcz...
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‘Be Inspired to Try Things, Miracles Happen When Someone Takes a Chance’: A...
As one of the most versatile and interesting filmmakers today, James Mangold seemed like a good choice for an interview. The last film he directed, this year’s critical favorite and box office triumph...
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Lives On the Line: The Grubby Politics of Paul Schrader’s ‘Blue Collar’
Paul Schrader got the chance to direct his first film after the success of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, the script of which Schrader cranked out in a week, laying bare his feelings of loneliness in...
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The immortal ‘Casablanca’: Why the Old Hollywood’s Everlasting Masterpiece Is...
There is only a spoonful of movies that enjoy such a reputation as Casablanca, the romantic war drama directed by Michael Curtiz which started winning over the world in late 1942. A standard inhabitant...
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John Toll: ‘There’s No Difference Between Feature Films and TV Shows—It’s All...
Having debuted as director of photography on Malcolm Leo’s documentary film The Beach Boys: An American Band back in 1985, John Toll has enjoyed a very successful career during which he worked closely...
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