Tag Archives: Melodrama

When I first saw Vincent Ward’s What Dreams May Come (1998), I was living in California and my mother and I went to a matinee showing. Robin Williams was still alive and although he won the Academy Award for Good ...

While even most casual film noir fans seem to be acquainted with Robert Aldrich’s nihilistic late, great entry in the canon, Kiss Me Deadly (1955), a noir-tinged film he made later that year with much of the same creative team, ...

While Ewald André Dupont’s Varieté (Variety, 1925) and William A. Wellman’s Beggars of Life (1928) come from two different studio systems—Weimar Germany’s legendary UFA in the case of Varieté, while Beggars of Life was a Hollywood production—they have a striking ...

“Her exultant dream of freedom ended—a helpless captive in the desert wastes.” —The Sheik The legacy of Italian-born star Rudolph Valentino seems to be largely relegated to silent film fans and early Hollywood aficionados, thanks in part to his highly ...

Though ridiculously prolific director Takashi Miike is most often remembered for his gory horror films—such as Audition (1999) and Ichi the Killer (2001)—he’s made far weirder films throughout a career that has spanned nearly three decades and explored a range ...

In many respects, the ‘40s were a strange time for horror films. With a few notable exceptions, like Le main du diable (1943) or Dead of Night (1945), the British and European nations avoided the genre thanks to the preoccupation ...

Over the last four months, I’ve done what I think might be an internet first: a complete examination of the films of Polish director Andrzej Zuławski from his short films, The Story of Triumphant Love and Pavoncello in 1969 (though ...

In the December 1, 1940 issue of Vogue, published just as the United States teetered on the brink of world war, novelist Carson McCullers wrote, “All men are lonely. But sometimes it seems to me that we Americans are the ...

After the reception of The Devil (1972) drove director Andrzej Zuławski out of Poland and into France, he didn’t make another feature film for three years, apparently filling his days in Paris with work as a writer. And though he spent ...

Prior to the 1950s, Richard Fleischer was mainly known for his work within the crime genre. At the start of the 1950s, however, he began to move away from the genre, producing MGM’s first 3-D film Arena, as well as the ...