Feature Articles

This week my Ken Russell series continues with a look at some of his short, music-themed episodes for the BBC’s Monitor series, which he contributed to from 1959 to 1965, during the early years of his career as a director. ...

The January 1919 death of socialist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg is often read by postwar historians as a sort of turning point in the Weimar Republic, a symbolic line drawn in the sand between a possible Communist future in Germany and ...

In parts one and two of my exploration of Southern Gothic films, I examined this murky subgenre from its origins in the Pre-Code films of the ‘30s to its explosion in the ‘40s and ‘50s with adaptations of the work ...

Over the past couple of decades, Spain’s film industry has churned out a number of high-profile horror films and chilling psycho-thrillers. Think Alejandro Amenábar’s Los otros/The Others (2001) starring Nicole Kidman, Guillermo del Toro’s twisted fairy-tale, El Laberinto del Fauno/Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), and, of course, El orfanato/The ...

It is not surprising that the term ‘American Gothic’ still makes folk automatically think of the more traditional traps of British and European Gothic; moonlit castles, howling wolves, heaving bosoms, pitchfork wielding villagers and Michael Ripper. By contrast, American Gothic ...

Generally remembered for some of his later French co-productions like the The Double Life of Veronique (1991) and the Three Colors trilogy (1993-1994), Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski effectively made his name in the international arthouse market with a television series ...

In the land of the killers, the mother’s boy will be king. That said, it takes a special kind to really stand out. In Irvin Berwick’s 1977 horror-that-could-have-been-ripped- straight-from- the-headlines film, Hitch Hike to Hell, we get a killer and a situation ...

“We thought we were driving South In our late model hearse We had no clue we were headed From bad to worse” “The Vampire Roadtrip” by The Hammerdowns There is something so quintessentially American about road trips. I’m not talking ...

“Pleasure is the law.” -Claude Debussy Though it was technically an episode made for the BBC’s Monitor program, a series primarily comprised of art documentaries, Ken Russell’s The Debussy Film (1965) is a feature length film, and though Russell had ...

For a variety of reasons, revenge films with female protagonists have long been a favorite subgenre of mine: titles ranging from arthouse fare like Clouzot’s Les diaboliques (1955) and Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black (1968); more classic exploitation titles like ...