Author Adrian Danks

Man Hunt is the first of a string of four bold anti-Nazi films – along with Hangmen Also Die! (1943), Ministry of Fear (1944) and Cloak and Dagger (1946) – that Fritz Lang made between 1941 and 1946. It is also...

Avaliha (First Graders, 1984) is a fascinating transitional work in Abbas Kiarostami’s career. Although it is, in many ways, a precursor to both Khane-ye doust kodjast? (Where is the Friend’s House?, 1987) and ...

Mitchell’s Leisen’s Remember the Night (1940) is most commonly discussed as the last film Preston Sturges wrote before becoming a director. It is often paired with another film directed by Leisen, Hold Back the...

“The time for action is over… The time for reflection begins.” In Margot Nash’s deeply personal essay film The Silences (2015), she mines her own past, memory, history and previous filmmaking practice to tell ...

The low budget, independently-produced Mauvaise graine (1934) is an outlier in Billy Wilder’s career. Although it characteristically illustrates the value and practice of collaboration – it was co-directed by t...

This is an extended and amended version of an article that first appeared in Directory of World Cinema: Australia & New Zealand, edited by Ben Goldsmith and Geoff Lealand (Intellect: Bristol and Chicago, 20...

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) was one of the projects closest to Billy Wilder’s heart – an organ that some commentators question even existed. It is also a notoriously vexed and incomplete work, co...

This is an extended and amended version of an article that first appeared in Directory of World Cinema: Australia & New Zealand, edited by Ben Goldsmith and Geoff Lealand (Intellect: Bristol and Chicago, 20...

Despite a directorial career in film and television that spread from the mid-1910s to the early 1970s, taking in a series of sustained collaborations with prominent stars (such as Bob Hope and Glenn Ford) and s...

I was interested in the nature of the book, which is actually about failure. And very few things in America seem to me to be about failure, because it’s a society geared to success, and failure is not only kind...

Although Sam Peckinpah’s films are routinely described in terms of their often-fetishistic fascination with violence, influential deployment of such devices as slow motion, split screen and contrapuntal editing...

Although Elia Kazan is most well known for films such as A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), On the Waterfront (1954) and East of Eden (1955) that feature heightened, often hyper-masculine and definitively express...