This dark comedy from Joel & Ethan Coen is a distillation of some of the duo’s most potent themes. Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is our Job figure, a physics professor in suburban Minneapolis who finds his life falling apart both personally and professionally. The principle Read More …
A seemingly perfect paradise is created for the home of insurance salesman Truman Burbank, who unknowingly serves as the protagonist for an elaborate television production broadcasting his life to the world. Truman (Jim Carrey) serves as the ordinary guy—the “true man”—navigating the world presented to Read More …
Widely ranked among Hollywood’s greatest spiritual parables, Groundhog Day has been claimed by existentialists, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, and Christians of all communions. Projection? In specifics, perhaps; in evocative power, no. A comic fantasy conceit—a single day Bill Murray keeps reliving—occasions sharply funny soundings in helplessness, power, consequences, Read More …
Adapted from a Buddhist morality tale, Onibaba – literally translated “demon woman” – never shocks, but rather haunts with the baleful atmosphere of its natural landscape. In fourteenth century feudal Japan, the peasant wife and mother of a soldier have taken to slaying lost samurai for their Read More …
Jacques Tourneur’s The Curse of the Demon follows skeptical psychologist John Holden (Dana Andrews) as he travels to England to debunk a Satanic cult led by the affable Dr. Julian Karswell (Niall MacGinnis). But, as it’s mentioned in the film, “[The devil] is most dangerous when he’s pleasant,” Read More …
One of the cinema’s greatest villains, Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins in his best-known performance) fascinates us because his ghoulish atrocities coincide quite unconflictedly with qualities that we associate with civilized, well-adjusted existence. A brilliant psychiatrist and a vastly urbane, sophisticated, cultured man, Lecter is a Read More …
The Tod Browning/Bela Lugosi earliest faithful-to-the-book rendition of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel still remains one of the most iconic vampire films today. Lugosi brings a power and presence to his role as the most famous monster in literature, representative of the devil as described in Read More …
Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now tells the story of a couple, John and Laura Baxter (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie), who are forced to reckon with past family tragedy when they meet a strange couple of women who claim to be able to communicate with their deceased Read More …
It took over five years and the tapping of every resource for David Lynch to fund his first feature-length film. The results of this painstaking process are obvious; the film is resonant in its visual renderings. Set in the decay of a post-industrial wasteland, Eraserhead delves into Read More …
Ridley Scott’s 1979 science fiction nightmare still terrifies audiences even though its sequels have lacked its chillingly intelligent design. The aliens, attacking from without and within, frighten us with the prospect that we might be carrying the cosmos’ most destructive force within us. Worse, the Read More …