By the time had started production on Saboteur, Alfred Hitchcock had already become something of an established filmmaker. He wasn’t the extraordinarily popular director known as The Master of Suspense who could make essentially any film he wanted due to his reputation as one of the great maestros of his craft, but he did have…

While it may seem peculiar to even imagine such a project existed, there is a film that exists at the perfect intersection between Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy and Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, a concept that is almost too absurd to be realistic. However, it is very much extant, as evident by Rendez-vous, the ambitious feature-length…

Nestled securely in the heart of the tumultuos 1990s is a film written by Hilary Henkin, the journeyman screenwriter responsible for working on some of Hollywood’s most ambitious productions, and directed by Peter Medak, the creative mind behind films like The Ruling Class and The Changeling, films that were not thoroughly appreciated at the time…

One of the great gifts bestowed on us as filmgoers is to live at the same time as François Ozon, who has been one of our best-working directors for over a quarter of a century. A filmmaker with an impeccable career that contains very few failures (and even his supposedly lesser works are quite remarkable…

The concept is extremely simple – two individuals meet in a hotel room, where they are given the guarantee of being alone (aside from the occasional planned visit from room service), where they intend to engage in a routine act of domination, only to find secrets revealed in the process that changes the course of…

Few filmmakers defined a decade in the way that Francis Ford Coppola had a stranglehold over the 1970s – he has made exceptional films in subsequent years, but his run between The Godfather and Apocalypse Now is most certainly one of the most extraordinary streaks a director has ever had, and solidified his place in…

We’ve spoken often about the formula that drives a strong horror film, which is remarkably similar to the process that goes into the creation of an excellent action film, a genre that we have not explored in nearly as much depth, despite it containing some terrific and unforgettable films. The key comparison between the two…

Rebecca occupies a peculiar place in the career of Alfred Hitchcock – it was neither his first major film, nor the one that can be considered his breakthrough. However, it was the first time he had made an American film, as well as his first collaboration with David O. Selznick, who is often considered the…

While we normally tend to gravitate towards films that follow a familiar structure (granted they are not predictable to the point of being tedious), there are some occasions when a more subversive work catches our attention, whether either in terms of narrative or execution, there is something quite different about a work that piques our…

The events surrounding the murders that took place in the city of Mashhad have lingered in the global culture as some of the most shocking crimes in recent memory, with the holy Iranian city being terrorized by a serial killer, known only as The Spider Killer (the term used by the media to refer to…