John Huston’s Let There Be Light (1946) was the final installment in a trilogy of wartime documentaries produced for the U.S. Army. He set about following a group of soldiers who had experienced severe battle fatigue and were undergoing treatment in a military psychiatric facility for a wide array of…
Eleven years ago, I was lured into the world of German Expressionism via the hypnotic gaze peering out at me from the cover of Fritz Lang’s The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933). It sat on the shelf at Barnes and Noble, beckoning me. Little did I know that my consumption…
With three bodies, a missing inventor, a host of suspects and hundreds of martinis, The Thin Man (1934) sparkled into life from the page to the screen. Much later, watching as a young kid, Nick and Nora Charles swanned away with my heart. The thorny mystery at the center of…
In this episode, Ants In Your Pants of 2015, we bring you our year-in-review, but with a twist. Rather than focus exclusively on new releases, we each chose ten of our favorite film finds. These are older films that we watched for the first time this year which made the…
Bill Forsyth’s Gregory’s Girl (1981) is the best teen comedy ever made and I will stand on John Hughes’ coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that. When I discovered it at age 12 it felt like it had been beamed across the Atlantic directly into my heart and…
The world changed in 1945. With the atomic bomb, a beast with unimaginable destructive power was unleashed. The world changed again in 1950 when Senator Joseph McCarthy became the face of the Red Scare. The Thing from Another World (1951) arrived shortly after, and captures a time of paranoia–both scientific…
There aren’t many films more personal to me than Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men (2007). I grew up at the foot of the Wichita Mountains in Oklahoma, so I am intimately familiar with this scrub brush landscape and these hard-bitten, laconic plainsfolk. They are my people.…
Why do I enjoy this film so much? In the simplest terms, The Uninvited (1944) features a big house by the sea I really want to live in. Put that together with a great puzzle to solve, and I think this is a corker of a film. A couple of…
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) ripped into my life on Thanksgiving 1984 and I have, gratefully, never fully recovered. It was spawned from the belly of a country that was sick and sad during my earliest formative years. As a nation, we were burdened with post-Watergate paranoia, the exhaustion…
What does it mean to set out in an unknown world, independent and eager? What does it mean to set out in a world when you have never known independence and when eagerness is considered shameful? Satyajit Ray’s landmark work Mahanagar (1963), or The Big City, seeks to explore these…