Eric Henderson

Rosemary’s Baby is one of horror cinema’s all-time slow burns, drawing viewers gradually into entertaining the possibility that the movie’s series of strange coincidences and accumulating sense of dread are only subjective representations of Rosemary’s unraveling mental state.

If it’s possible for a parable to be too simple to even qualify as a parable, the convincingly dim Snow White represents the dopey standard.

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.

Though the film is obviously coated with a veneer of nostalgic sentimentality, Eastwood never lets Honkytonk Man veer into maudlin territory.

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

The Seventh Seal, assisted by cinematographer Gunnar Fischer’s richly overexposed images, operates as though it contains the undiluted essence of life’s fueling dialectic formula. Occasionally it does, most notably in the terrifying arrival of the self-flagellants to a weak-willed village. But the road-trippers in Bergman’s follow-up, Wild Strawberries, achieve a far greater grace and clarity with only a fraction of the heavy lifting.

Imagine parents sitting in the audience with their naughty children (who used their Cabbage Patch dolls as driveway obstructions for their Big Wheel obstacle courses) and feeling ruefully double-crassed.

From the very first scene, The Howling plays around with the notion of vulnerability as a role-playing exercise, a pseudo-sex game.

The film is riddled with an unmistakably misogynistic bent, and can’t be bothered to supply one single likable soul.

Great auntie to waking nightmare movies about distaff insanity as diverse as Images, 3 Women, A Woman Under the Influence, and Mulholland Drive, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death spends 90 minutes tapping lightly but incessantly on its heroine’s fragile sanity, as though it were some sort of Fabergé S&M model egg.

The Passion of Joan of Arc remains the moment that [Dreyer] guided his medium to new heights, and also crafted a work that would endure outside of any specific context.

White Hunter, Black Heart finds Eastwood reaching a peak in the fields of both film direction and acting.

To be blunt, because there was just barely enough material in the source text to pad out the film, the filmmakers also used a lot of the stuff that worked in novel form but came off as stultifying on the screen.

Unfortunately, the haphazard, showy cross-cutting between Laine’s to-the-camera narration and the flashbacks (sometimes to scenes he couldn’t possibly recollect) do little to hide the fact that Romero, like his aimless protagonist, seemingly couldn’t care less.

Cruella De Vil is so much a tour de force that she single-handedly snatches the movie away from any retroactive comparisons to the likes of The Rescuers or Robin Hood or any of the other post-classical Disney features whose sloppiness is their only saving grace.

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.

Silent Night, Deadly Night brought the idea to new levels of cold sleaziness.

In the theater, whenever Mike, Crow or Tom Servo flub a punchline or resort to a fart joke, you almost want to lean forward and shush them.

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

With Playtime, Tati made one of the most fully inhabitable films ever.

Uneven and amateurish, with a sense of vulgarity that’s now dated enough to seem downright Victorian, The Kentucky Fried Movie proves the maxim, “comedy is in the eye of the beholder.”

No matter how much director Mark Lester attempts to hide his sermonizing behind sensationalistic-pedagogic terrorism, he does himself in whenever a jaded cop shrugs his shoulders and grunts, for the umpteenth time, What can we do, they’re juveniles?

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.

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.

Chantal Akerman’s 1975 experiment in film form, Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, is an astonishing work of subtextual feminism which has to count as one of the seminal films of the 1970s.

A bald-faced lamprey hitching its razor-tipped maw on the chassis of The Exorcist, The Omen’s Sunday-school parable of gothic Cathsploitation comes twice as thick and thrice as pious.

Au Hasard Balthazar possesses a strictly balanced, bemused-unto-neigh-indifferent attitude toward delineating between the wry and the glum, the sacred and the profane.