One of the main unifying traits that connects nearly all the filmmakers who were part of the New Hollywood Cinema period (not every last one, of course) was their knowledge of cinema. For most of them, this was the result of having gone through film school rather than come up as an apprentice, the way […]
1968, the bright dividing line between contemporary and classic horror – in the autumn of that year, George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead brought terrifyingly explicit violence and gore to the genre and things change forever. But that groundbreaking horror classic was beat to theaters by a few months by a film whose […]
A review requested by Scott D, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. I say this as someone born 12 years later, but it’s probably not possible for anyone who wasn’t around in 1969 to genuinely grasp the enormity of The Wild Bunch upon its initial release. We can […]
A review requested by Travis Neeley, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. By 1974, Brian De Palma had seven features under his belt, with the seventh, 1973’s Sisters, having kicked off his legendary run of Hitchcock riffs. So we cannot possibly call Phantom of the Paradise, the director’s […]
With what I can only call the most admirable clarity, the monumental biopic Patton, Best Picture Oscar winner of 1970, opens with a kind of thesis statement that lays out everything the rest of the film is to contain. I don’t refer to the main body of its legendary opening scene, in which famed World […]
The classic version of the story goes that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas ruined everything, just absolutely every god-damned thing, when they released their big ol’ popcorn movies Jaws and Star Wars in 1975 and ’77, and made all the studios go “Whoa! We don’t want to keep making little movies about the lives of […]
One of the grandest clichés in the critics toolkit is to refer to a classic work of satire or social commentary as being “ahead of its time”, with the passage of years not serving to blunt the impact of a film’s satiric insight but to make them seem less like satire at all, and more […]
The posters and trailers for the 1973 release American Graffiti, one of the most successful American movies marketed almost solely on the basis of pandering to its target audience’s nostalgia, challenged that audience to remember, “Where were you in ’62?” For the film’s director and co-writer, George Lucas, the answer to that question is that […]
Cinema history, as an intellectual pursuit, is not nearly as old as cinema itself. In different countries, the rise of a semi-professional class of cineastes emerged through different processes at different time, and in America it began in the 1960s as a response to ideas filtering in from France, and the French critic/directors of the […]
The New Hollywood Cinema was largely a young man’s game, with most of its leading lights part of the first film school generation. Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, and Michael Cimino were both born in 1939; Brian De Palma in 1940; Martin Scorsese in 1942; Terrence Malick in 1943; George Lucas and John Milius in […]
It’s probably possible to overstate the importance of Bonnie and Clyde to the subsequent development of American cinema, but you’d have to indulge in some pretty outrageous hyperbole to do it. It almost single-handedly dragged Hollywood into the aggressive stylistic modernism that Europe had been enjoying for most of the 1960s; there had been scattered […]
For some time now, I’ve had people raising the question, “When are you going to review Jaws?” because as we are all aware, there are not nearly enough reviews of Jaws in this world. That said, I am not immune to begging, and when the slowest week for new releases in several months stumbled into […]
