One of Hollywood's most iconic westerns, Howard Hawks' Red River launches cinema's grandest cattle drive, and one of the screen's most powerful father-son dramas. One of John Wayne's most intense roles inspired one of his finest performances, and in his debut leading role, Montgomery Clift instantly leapt to the forefront of Hollywood's young actors. After the Civil War, ranch owner Thomas Dunson (Wayne) leads a drive of ten thousand cattle out of an impoverished Texas to the richer markets of Missouri, al..
One of legendary director Douglas Sirk's most cherished passion projects, this spectacular adaptation of William Faulkner's Pylon has risen in stature to become one of his most acclaimed films. Reuniting with his core creative team from oil tycoon saga Written on the Wind, Sirk this time examined the marginal lives and lost souls living one rung from the bottom with surpassing delicacy and artistry. Rock Hudson stars as journalist Burke Devlin, fascinated by the sordid lives of a trio eking out a living in..
Both controversial and relentless in its depiction of suppression and brutality, Punishment Park was heavily attacked by the mainstream press and permitted only the barest of releases in 1971. However, like Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969) and Robert Kramer’s Ice (1969), Peter Watkins’ film has established itself as one of the key, yet rarely seen, radical films of the late 1960s/early 1970s. Giving voice to the disaffected youth of America that had lived through the campus riots at Ber..
The Blue Angel is one of the first German language sound films (filmed simultaneously in an English-language version), and the picture that represents the initial collaboration between Josef von Sternberg and his immortal muse, Marlene Dietrich. Following up his role in Sternberg's great silent The Last Command, Emil Jannings portrays a schoolteacher named Immanuel Rath, whose fateful expedition to catch his students frequenting the cabaret known as The Blue Angel leads to his own rapture with the establ..
The debut feature of Italian filmmaker-novelist-poet-provocateur Pier Paolo Pasolini (Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom; The Gospel According to Matthew; The Decameron), Accattone rocked the cinema world with its depictions, at once raw and elegant, of the underside of Roman street life ? and, in the process, seemed to announce a new direction for Italian films: a neo-neorealism.On the mean streets of Rome, Accattone's eponymous pimp (played by Franco Citti, one of a remarkable cast of local non -professional..
Jean Epstein's Coeur fidèle True established the great French filmmaker as one of the most inventive directors of the (then still silent) art form. A pared-down tale of a barmaid oppressed by an exploitative foster family who attempt to push her into the arms of an unscrupulous regular-about-town, Marie's heart (exuberantly vivified by Gina Marès) belongs, as far as she's concerned, to the tenderly blank Jean (Léon Mathot)... Coeur fidèle drives its simple story (which, with its ..
A deeply disturbing character study of a handsome and sociopathic American in Paris, writer-director Antonio Campos's Simon Killer hones further the psychological perceptiveness and keen filmmaking craft exhibited in Campos's acclaimed feature debut Afterschool. Brady Corbet (Melancholia, Thirteen, Martha Marcy May Marlene) plays Simon, a recent college graduate full of promise and potential, who goes to Paris to begin a trip around Europe following a break-up with a long-time girlfriend. An outsider adrif..
Originally rejected by the BBFC on its original release for being 'against nature', this first and best screen adaptation of H. G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau is a taboo-flaunting, blood-curdling spectacular, and one of Hollywood's wildest, most notorious, pre-Code pictures. Shipwrecked and adrift, Edward Parker finds himself a guest on Dr. Moreau's isolated South Seas island, but quickly discovers the horrifying nature of the doctor's work and the origin of the strange forms inhabiting the isle: a colo..
Le Silence de la mer – Jean-Pierre Melville’s debut film – is an adaptation of the novella of the same title by celebrated French Resistance author Vercors (the pen name of Jean Bruller). Clandestinely written in 1942 during the Nazi occupation of France and furtively distributed it captured the spirit of the moment and quickly became a staple of the Resistance.Melville’s cinematic adaptation – partly shot in Vercors’ own house – tells ..
