1917: Crossing No Man’s Land

Photo: Universal We’re only a week away from the Oscars and 1917 is the clear frontrunner, especially since it won the top prize at the Producers Guild Awards. Not that…

Parasite: Movin’ On Up

Choi Woo-shik, Song Kang-ho, Jang Hye-jin and Park So-dam. Photo: CJ Entertainment As fall descended on us this year, it became increasingly clear that class warfare was going to be…

Victor Frankenstein 

In 19th-century London, medical student Victor Frankenstein (James McAvoy) helps a hunchback (Daniel Radcliffe), who has great knowledge of human anatomy, escape from a circus. We’ve seen the Mary Shelley…

Breathless: A Blueprint for the New Wave

Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo. Photo: Les Films Impéria The kind of movie you see in film school and then you make a decision – either I love it or…

Rashomon: One Death, Four Stories

Toshiro Mifune and Machiko Kyo. Photo: Daiei The Rashomon effect is a term that entered the English language maybe as early as the 1960s, meant to describe an event that…

In the Heat of the Night: Virgil and the Rednecks

Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger. Photo: United Artists The 1960s are easily dismissed when we’re talking about which movies were recognized at the Oscars. In many cases, those that weren’t…

Training Day 

Young cop Jake Hoyt (Ethan Hawke) hopes to rise from the ranks by working with a seasoned narcotics detective (Denzel Washington) but discovers that he is one reason why the…

Imitation Game: Another Beautiful Mind

Benedict Cumberbatch. Photo: The Weinstein Company The title refers to a paper that the brilliant mathematician Alan Turing wrote in 1950 where he introduced his now-famous test of a machine’s…

12 Angry Men: Choosing Life or Death

Photo: United Artists The most famous episode of the CBS anthology series Studio One (1947-1958) is from 1954 and features a teleplay by Reginald Rose. Depicting a process where one…