Eric Henderson

A true amalgam of creative forces individually pooling their studio-contract talents like a hive of bees.

Maniac Cop is the type of movie that you would want to watch through the slits in a sewer grate, only its execution sits perched well above its scummy aim, and the end result is that you feel guilty for wishing for something more perverted.

Throughout, Pennebaker’s camera moves in as close as it can to capture every moment of doubt, disappointment and rage in Stritch’s face. That even still viewers debate whether Stritch was playing up the drama of the moment for the cameras only underlines how deftly Pennebaker’s brief and unassuming film resides at the heart of the interplay between work, art, and performance.

At once an excoriating satire of the performativity of homosexuality within a social media-addled community as well as a seemingly earnest lament for the total loss of collectivity, the film minces neither words nor bodily appendages.

Inge’s scenario unravels alarmingly once the two would-be lovers start to drift apart thanks to Deanie’s nervous breakdown and the simultaneous (almost psychically connected) market crash of 1929, but the first half of the film is a tour de force of deferred urges, contortion acts of awkward intimacy, and the thrill of adolescence.

MacLaine grabbing Dukakis by the bangs, shoving her head back with a sneering “Have your roots done,” radiates more feminine fellowship than a dozen sisterhoods of the travelling pants. Not bad for a movie that alternates the tragedy of dying young and beautiful against the comedy of growing old and bitter.

With Malcolm X, Lee doesn’t so much inject his sensibilities into the lifeline of his subject, but rather comes to see how his place as a film director can be integrated within the social movement of X’s message.

Lewis, through sheer force of will, turns the script’s easy ways out into the essence of blunt, adolescent sexual flowering.

A pop sonata of stand-up comedy routines layered with, if not vitality, then at least honest energy.

White Heat’s ultimate message: love’s a bitch…even crypto-incestuous love.

Cross of Iron would almost seem a proper mea culpa by Peckinpah for his controversial career, and the pre-Dogville closing credit sequence featuring a risible, anti-patriotic photo slideshow reveals a director still capable of new and inventive provocation tactics.

The clothing may be couture, but Funny Face’s plot is strictly wash, rinse, repeat.

Kathryn Bigelow hyper-realistically, almost dispassionately, covers her ensemble’s actions in the manner of a somber disaster film.

Much like with Neighbors 2, Mike and Dave’s obvious ace in the hole is its commitment to gender parity.

The Bad Seed might not have the lurid veneer of Oedipal conflict that turned The Good Son into a supreme guilty pleasure, but it’s got more false-façade performances than you could ever hope for.

It feels less like an cautionary adventure movie or the classy Hollywood equivalent of a Reader's Digest "Drama in Real Life" and much more like a disaster epic.

When the trademark Shyamalan twist finally arrives, it doesn't synthesize anything other than the director's devotion to his signature gimmick.

Gaslight is an expertly directed and evenly paced slow burn (and Dame May Whitty is a stitch, though underused, as a nosy neighbor lady), but its lack of a sound moral and psychological center renders it totally transitory and forgettable.

Though Bonnie And Clyde may have been conceived as a proto-European hybrid and The Graduate a California thoroughbred, the violent hemorrhage that closes the Depression-era/Vietnam-era touchstone makes as good a case as anything in filmed entertainment that American mass media operates in the declarative.

The film, meekly directed far across the soundstage by former actor Paul Henreid, is a potboiler filled with oh-so-convenient plot twists and purely incidental characterizations.

Death Race is a maladroit but exuberantly gamey mix of social commentary and blue-collar goofiness.

This lack of force-fed moralizing, coupled with its diffuse plot and hazily psychedelic imagery, makes it hardly surprising that the film’s revival came about when it developed a cult following.

It presses the case that the complexity of the human condition distracts us from the pure dignity of a noble act.

An extraordinarily imaginative director, Tran fashions Cyclo into a sensualist nightmare.

The makers of this rescued-footage documentary ultimately understand the power of its subjects' personalities.

Its dedication to the transgressive power of frivolity remains the franchise's greatest weapon.

Without spoiling its increasingly ludicrous (and ludicrously believable) escalations, American Fiction ultimately gets off scot-free clinging doggedly to the middle ground.

Barker’s vision cribs equally from the mythos of vampires and zombies, but Hellraiser‘s overriding ridiculousness (and nagging budgetary shortcomings) can’t disguise the fact that the movie is at least unwittingly a product of the AIDS crisis.