|Matthew Christensen| A lot of what’s been written about Alfred Hitchock’s Shadow of a Doubt has to do with the use of doubles. As with Strangers on a Train (1951), these dichotomies invite us to look at the muddied line between good and evil, and in doing so expose “what lurks underneath… Continue reading
|Chris Polley| This was how it all began, really—music that’s performed, visuals that are projected, and never a word is uttered. Dating back to the first public presentation of the works of the Lumière brothers in Paris back in 1895, musical accompaniment to a film exhibition was performed… Continue reading
|Sophie Durbin| My first encounter with George Sluizer’s The Vanishing was on a lazy evening in February of 2023. The Criterion Channel description promised a “truly unsettling” ending, which drew me in since I love being upset by fictional peoples’ problems… Continue reading
|MH Rowe| You might say The Vanishing (1988) tells the tale of two creepy men. One is a fretful, controlling boyfriend, the other a methodical murderer. With a different emphasis, the director George Sluizer might have smoothed out the boyfriend and signaled to the audience that we aren’t supposed to understand Rex Hofman (Gene Bervoets) as a creep… Continue reading
|MH Rowe| One triumph of Peter Weir’s Witness (1985) is its sense of dreamy metaphor. The score, the cinematography, the simmer of desire between its lead characters, John Book (Harrison Ford) and Rachel Lapp (Kelly McGillis), and the situation of a hard-bitten Philadelphia Continue reading
