Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 horror thriller Psycho caused a sensation when it opened in June about fifty years ago. There were a number of reasons for that, one of them being…
Rashomon effect revisited: Toshiro Mifune and Machiko Kyo in Akira Kurosawa classic. Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 classic Rashomon, which officially introduced Japanese cinema to the world at large, will be the…
A few weeks ago, when I began watching a screener of director-screenwriter-etc-etc. Brian Pera’s The Way I See Things, I had no idea what to expect. At first, I wasn’t…
Il Grido 1957: Michelangelo Antonioni at his Neo-Realist best So much attention has been paid to Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni’s films from the 1960s that his earlier Neo-Realist efforts have…
Michelangelo Antonioni, the film master of modern alienation, despair, and ennui, was the third important personage of world cinema to die in the last three days – Ingmar Bergman and…
Contempt with Brigitte Bardot. Of the films I’ve seen so far of French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard, his best is Le Mépris / Contempt (1963), adapted by Godard from…
No filmmaker’s career has been more defined and structured by their musical choices than that of Werner Herzog. This claim is evident from his first full-length feature, Signs of Life…
Anna Magnani in Bellissima. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (website) began a mini Anna Magnani retrospective, Mamma Roma: The Films of Anna Magnani, on Friday, Nov. 3. Twelve…
Michelangelo Antonioni movies at LACMA “Modernist Master: Michelangelo Antonioni,” is the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s (website) retrospective honoring the Italian filmmaker, whose body of work includes revered classics…
The Other Side of the Street movie: Marcos Bernstein’s tale of a one-woman neighborhood watch who may have witnessed a murder is reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, with Fernanda…