Dec 3, 2020
Hal Hartley’s films are marked by spare, precise visuals, a stylized approach to dialogue that allows characters to speak their innermost thoughts, and an intuitive gift for playing with the conventions of movie-making and storytelling. …
Shane Carruth was a math major and engineer before he taught himself filmmaking. He shot his first film, Primer, on 16mm film for $7,000. Disguised as a time-travel sci-fi movie, Primer is also a vivid …
Working at Warner Bros. from 1938 through 1962, legendary animator Chuck Jones perfected the wisecracking Bugs Bunny, the short-tempered Daffy Duck, and the amorous Pepé Le Pew. The purest expression of his artistry is his …
The pioneering African-American director Charles Burnett was a film student at UCLA when he made Killer of Sheep (1977), a powerful independent film that combines blues-inspired lyricism and neo-realism in its drama of an inner-city …
The Canadian director David Cronenberg has redefined the notion of what a horror film can be. While horror and science-fiction films traditionally have been about threats from the outside—monsters or alien forces—Cronenberg’s films (including The …
“Jimmy Stewart on Mars” was how Mel Brooks, who produced The Elephant Man, described David Lynch. The collision between the quotidian and the dreamlike has been Lynch’s key theme, from the suburban nightmares of Blue …
Mike Nichols took Broadway by storm in the early 1960s with his comedy partner Elaine May. He began his directing career with the stage production of Barefoot in the Park and became a film director …
Former Monty Python animator Terry Gilliam is one of cinema’s premier fantasists, a creator of films notable for their stunning visual style and their iconoclastic sensibility. With Brazil, Gilliam created the ultimate film of bureaucratic …
In Canadian director Atom Egoyan’s early films, such as Family Viewing and Speaking Parts, technology—in the form of home video and surveillance cameras—played a key role in his complex, multilayered storylines. Yet as his career …
