The Hitch-Hiker Puts You In The Driver's Seat...of Terror!

Ida Lupino's seminal 1953 feature The Hitch-Hiker has been referred to as a Desert Noir by many film scholars, an apt description given how it shifts the tone and style of a traditional film noir from its conventional city setting to a more isolated desert area. But for my money, The Hitch-Hiker was also evocative of those torture horror films that were all the rage in American cinema in the mid-2000s, the likes of Saw and Hostel that were all about the grotesque horror experienced by normal people at the hands of sadistic individuals. The Hitch-Hiker, thanks to Haye's Code era restrictions, can't even begin to be as gruesome as your average Eli Roth movie but its emphasis on the misery of its two lead protagonists evoked those grisly modern films to me anyway.

Thank God Fritz Lang's Excellent The Big Heat Managed To Somehow Get Past Hayes Code Censors

Film noirs were one of the rare relatively high-profile Hollywood genres that could get away with a certain amount of moral ambiguity in the Hayes Code era of filmmaking, though even a number of film noirs had to concede to Hayes Code restrictions in the name of "protecting the sanctity of the family". Watching The Big Heat, it's a wonder this film made it past the Hayes Code censors, especially since The Big Heat takes a gigantic agitated sledgehammer to the institutions of law & order that the Hayes Code was so keen on upholding. The Big Heat is an utter nightmare for anyone devoted to what the Hayes Code stood for but it's a dream come true for everybody else just looking for some good cinema to enjoy.

It's No Wonder The Excellent Romantic-Comedy Roman Holiday Launched Audrey Hepburn As A Movie Star

There's something exciting about going back to an iconic movie stars first breakthrough lead performance. Whether we're talking about early films starring Tom Hanks, Toshiro Mifune or Katherine Hepburn, that sensation of going back to a time when a revered household name was merely an up-and-comer looking for their big break is uniformly incredibly exciting. The same can be said for going back in time to the 1953 romantic-comedy Roman Holiday, an elegantly simple affair that served as the first star vehicle for Audrey Hepburn. Though now recognized as one of the pivotal figures of the American cinema scene, there was a time in the middle of the 20th century where Hepburn wasn't a widely well-known leading lady, though, of course, Roman Holiday changed all of that!

The Death of Stalin Finds Humor In Real-Life Horrors

"How can you run and plot at the same time?"

After eight years, writer/director Armando Iannucci has returned to the world of feature films (he's been busy the last few years working on the highly acclaimed HBO TV show Veep) with The Death of Stalin. Like his 2009 film In The Loop, The Death of Stalin is a dark farce comedy depicting people in positions of noteworthy political power acting scummy in the name of personal gain. Instead of coming off as merely reheated leftovers of In The Loop though, The Death of Stalin takes this basic concept and clearly charts its own terrain. This is a film with its own distinct personality to its name, one that aids greatly in making The Death of Stalin as highly humorous as it is.

People Are Already At War With Themselves Before Any Weapons Are Fired In From Here To Eternity

Remember Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor? The internet, and also Team America: World Police, have turned that movie into such an endless punchline that it feels almost pointless to critique this motion picture once again, but for the purposes of this review, I feel it is imperative to do so. The feature film that Roger Ebert once accurately described as "...a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle" (God bless Roger Ebert) failed to make a compelling drama all about small-scale human drama that transpired before, during and after the real-life attack on Pearl Harbor for too many reasons to count. There's no single solution to all of them, but if Michael Bay and company wanted a better blueprint for how to make a drama that incorporates Pearl Harbor into its plot, maybe they should have looked to 1953's From Here To Eternity for inspiration?

Ugetsu Shows The Price We Pay For Too Much Escapism

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #26
Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #50 (tied with City Lights and La Jetee)

Over here in America, we've been taking a fancy to remaking American fairy tale movies (which are typically based on folklore from other countries because what don't we steal from other places and claim as our own?) that have a strong nostalgic connection with general audiences with the likes of Beauty And The Beast and Cinderella. Back in 1953, director Kenji Mizoguchi undertook a similar task of reconfiguring well-known stories into a new cinematic incarnation though, in his case, he was handling two 18th century stories penned by Ueda Akinari that would make up the groundwork for the motion picture known as Ugetsu.

Now Here's A Little (Tokyo) Story, All About How My Life Got Flipped, Turned Upside Down...

It's always interesting to watch a piece of work from a famous director for the first time without any preconceived notions about the director in question. Oh, I had heard of legendary director Yasujiro Ozu plenty of times over the years, but the idiosyncracies of his work were an utter mystery to me. Tokyo Story would be my first ever glimpse into what kind of cinema Ozu was capable of crafting. As it turns out, it's quite a different, slower-paced piece of filmmaking that didn't work 100% of the time for me personally, but even in its weakest moments it doesn't bog down the strong acting and fascinating themes of Tokyo Story.