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Ran
There’s no shortage of reasons to watch Ran on a big screen. A chance to better appreciate the film’s striking use of color. An opportunity to be engulfed by the torrential sweep of its battle...
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Bigger Than Life
If subversion and trouble are in Ray's arsenal in Bigger than Life, to what ends? Critical readings tend to differ on the precise thrust of Ray's critique of middle-class America: Is it that Avery's...
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Journey to Italy
Rivette’s ordination of Journey to Italy as the first modern film is, in a philosophical sense, paradoxical, because in fact it is modernity itself which is being shunned, or at best broken down and...
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Do the Right Thing
Within the strict temporal and location confines of Do the Right Thing lies a work concerned with tackling the biggest of American themes—race relations, ambition, urban survival, economics, violence,...
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The Right Stuff, Reds, and Paris, Texas
The 1980s were rife with cinematic Trojan horses that proved more troubling and complex than their packaging, or pop cultural context, would indicate . . . These three films in particular explored the...
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The Big Trail
“Westward Ho” is branded on the American consciousness, and every generation gets its own account of the opening of the frontier as filtered through the era’s pop-culture. For some it’s a dog-eared...
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There Will Be Blood
What goes up must come down, but it’s just as true to say that There Will Be Blood illustrates the reverse. In its most purely beautiful passage, a shot of two children hopping off a church porch is...
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Singin’ in the Rain
One could view Singin’ in the Rain as the ultimate example of the perfection of the Hollywood machine—it moves like clockwork, never lagging, from one gonzo set piece to the next. But machine-tooled...
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L'Avventura
How fatalistic is L’Avventura? Of all the European imports to take American film culture by storm in the early sixties, it’s certainly among the most resigned. There’s no climactic moment of...
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Halloween
Our visual perceptions of the adult Michael start with an arm, then a shoulder, then a far away silhouette. His presence alone is thoroughly intimidating—he is Hitchcock’s ticking bomb—and we may only...
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See It Big: The Sound of Music
The Sound of Music was shot in Todd-AO, one of many widescreen formats developed in the fifties to compete with television. Cinema had to become all the more spectacular: bigger, more colorful,...
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