Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

With his fourth feature, Alan J. Pakula made a fairly decisive break with what had been his most easily definable thematic concerns up to that point, and thereby created one of the two films that have since absolutely secured his position as one of the great American directors of the 1970s. Prior to 1974, we […]

When we last left the career of Alan J. Pakula, he had just completed the first of his major thriller-mysteries, Klute. Hindsight tells us that the director would become one of the decade’s most important makers of such movies, and thus we could be tempted to assume that he’d found his “correct” path as a […]

When I included Alan J. Pakula on my poll for who most deserved a full-on retrospective (mostly at the urging of a friend, who wanted to see Pakula get his proper consideration as one of the great directors of the 1970s), it was with no small trepidation; though I didn’t think he’d come anywhere close […]

Before he became one of the most influential and arguably the most under-appreciated directors of the New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s (and long before he became one of the many New Hollywood filmmakers to turn into a parody of themselves in the ’80s and ’90s), Alan J. Pakula was a movie producer of no […]