David Ehrenstein

As outré as it is, the most subversive thing about this classic farce is its take on what’s normal.

Countercultural icons Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov makes square subversive in Bartel’s cult classic.

If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about

One of the most meticulously crafted supernatural fantasy films ever made, Masaki Kobayashi’s Kwaidan (1964) is also one of the most unusual. While such classic black and white chillers as The Uninvited, The Innocents and The Haunting teasingly spe

“I wish to boast,” Bernard Shaw wrote, “that Pygmalion has been an extremely successful play, both on stage and screen, all over Europe and North America as well as at home. It is so intensely and deliberately didactic, and its subject is estee

When two different critics polls cited Raging Bull as the greatest film of the 1980s, it was the final confirmation of what many film lovers had come to suspect for some time. As a decade marked mainly by the cheapest sort of slam-bang popcorn thrill

One of the most ingenious and entertaining crime thrillers ever made, The Killing marks what its director Stanley Kubrick would like to think of as the real beginning of his career. The future director of 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, an

Over the years the cinema has given us any number of tales of the criminal underworld, and explorations of the mindsets of murderers. Yet for all that’s come before there’s been nothing quite like Shohei Imamura’s Vengeance Is Mine. Based on o

A low-key mood study about a broken-down carnival strongman and his half-wit assistant traveling through the bleak backwaters of post-war Italy wouldn’t, at first glance, appear to have much going for it in the way of international critical and com