Well, we can cross one movie off our list of hoped-for DVDs! The Criterion Collection has had the good sense and taste to release director Anthony Mann’s magnificent western THE FURIES (1950). Whether you are a collector or a Netflix user, it’s one you should not miss. In my book SCREEN SAVERS, I focus on [...]

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It’s rare for an animated film to have such a strong social context in recent history. The Iron Giant is a children’s film about the Cold War, and it deals explicitly with the fear of other, yet it does so without becoming a didactic finger-wagger. With humor and the emotional bonding between boy and giant, [...]

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The time travel in Portrait of Jennie is of a spiritual variety, an inexplicable colliding of past and present in the name of a transcendent love that would otherwise never be. In Time after Time, traveling through time is accomplished by the nuts and bolts of science, specifically a helicopter-like machine that converts sun rays [...]

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In late 1948, producer David O. Selznick released Portrait of Jennie, a romantic fantasy that defied the conventions and, not surprisingly, died at the box-office. Audiences were asked to accept a “serious” romance between a man and a female ghost in a time-curving story in which the past and the present come together. It’s easy [...]

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Lewton used three directors for the series: Jacques Tourneur, Mark Robson, and Robert Wise. Each of these men had worked as film editors, with Wise editing Citizen Kane (1941) and Robson on board as the associate editor. After directing Cat People, Tourneur directed the next two: I Walked with a Zombie (1943), a voodoo reworking [...]

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