Eric Henderson

Kümel’s impulse to remain on the waning edge of eroticism turns what could’ve been another cheap thrill into a genuinely unsettling examination of the human race’s most happily sanctioned form of vampirism: man-woman couplings.

Romero’s own Belle du Jour, a tale of a lonely, neglected housewife whose discontent and suppressed erotic desires are efficiently conveyed in a series of bondage-tinged dream sequences.

Magnoli’s professional, downright neorealistic approach to filming the concert clips almost disguises how audacious a structural conceit is the film’s climax: nearly a half-hour of musical numbers that render the solipsism of Prince’s vanity project entirely justifiable.

You can't help but be impressed by how much it represents a natural, even defensive evolutionary step on its creator's part.

A highly impressive effort.

Rose’s dizzy, Jungle Fever-ish romanticism is juxtaposed against his cold, Cronenbergian dystopia to create Candyman‘s uniquely baroque use of modern urban blight, subtle political undercurrents, and hints of fallen woman melodrama. It creates a startlingly effective shocker that gains power upon further, sleepless-night reflection.

Ichikawa Kon’s 1956 film The Burmese Harp is a tender almost-musical film about the horrors of war and the obliteration of identity.

The punchlines come quick and thick, with little foreplay or consideration for anything other than getting a physical reaction from the audience.

The Crazies lacks the nightmarish momentum of Romero’s best zombie flicks, but it’s no less astute with its allegorical potshots.

Altman’s disgruntled comedy California Split, aside from its typically busy soundtrack (it was the first movie Altman used eight-channel audio to capture all the dialogue), seems a relatively straightforward buddy film...it’s also an anti-buddy parable in which George Segal and Elliott Gould’s homosocial behavior is equated unflatteringly against their obsessive gambling addictions.

The Italian Job isn’t the first movie to take car chases into strange and new environments, but it sure is creative.

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear now seems much less like Salt of the Earth-as-a-potboiler and a lot more like the spiritual godfather to every testosterone-fueled thrill ride since.

Kiki presents a world of fantasy in such a genteel, unforced manner that it only seems ordinary and mundane. As such, it feels like a touchstone for all of Miyazaki’s later, even greater works of cartoon storytelling art.

Rather than clarifying, De Palma’s technique with Raising Cain effectively obliterates the audience’s bearings. Which gives the film’s final sequence—on the surface a shameless swipe from Dario Argento’s killer reveal at the climax of Tenebre—a nasty twist.

A quaint portrait it’s not, and aside from the conditions of the rat-trap midtown hotel where the competing queens are put up in, it’s hardly fly-on-the-wall either. While it presents its subjects at arm’s length, The Queen consistently recognizes the constraints they face.

Viva‘s intentionally flat performances and flatter double entendres...mercilessly satirize the Playboy mindset even as the film revels in the kitschiness of it all.

School Daze is, if nothing else, a compelling time capsule of racial politics in the late ‘80s, ethnographically sealed-off in a hothouse micro-environment (an all-black college campus) that’s as constrictive as Lee’s varying plot threads and stylistic whims are profuse.

Magnificent Obsession was a decisive turning point for Douglas Sirk, kicking off a beloved string of loopy ’50s melodramatic masterpieces.

Undoubtedly [Cronenberg's] best from this period and also the most troubling.

Bujold’s enthusiasm as a performer redeems the entire picture, especially when she’s asked to perform flashback scenes that shouldn’t work, but, thanks to her, represent another of De Palma’s fearlessly experimental whims.

The title alone of Kirby Dick’s alleged documentary Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist practically screams: This is not your standard biopic!

It’s Price that gives House of Wax its characteristic balance of elegance and lurid theatricality.

Critters 2: The Main Course offers a heaping helping of everything that’s missing from the first film: a reasonably intelligent and witty script, a supple and unchained playfulness, and an anarchic mélange of diverse genre riffs.

Maybe because How Green Was My Valley doesn’t delve as deeply into the heart of darkness as Ford did in his earlier The Grapes of Wrath, it remains one of his most curiously underrated films.

Director Francis films the scenes that center around the vampire with yellow-brown gels around the frames’ edges, giving the impression that they too are from Dracula’s omniscient view. They give Dracula Has Risen From the Grave a musty, jaundiced sensuality (like finding Great Aunt Mildred’s mothball stank-ridden garter belt hidden in the back of her Victorian closet) that characterizes Hammer’s blending of gothic tradition with modern prurience.

The film vibrates with a profound respect for historical veracity, the busy intersection between political sociology and psychology, and grunting, portentous masculinity.

A nightmarishly schematic fantasia of guiltless discomfort.

Death Becomes Her is one of the few mainstream comedies that you don’t feel even had to try to be outlandish. It was simply born that way.