Author Wheeler Winston Dixon

b. December 25 1899, New York City, U.S. d. January 14 1957, Los Angeles, California, U.S. Humphrey DeForest Bogart, arguably the first true anti-hero of the cinema, was born on Christmas Day in 1899 in New Y...

“Directing is fundamentally the truth as it's transformed into images: sorrow, hope, love, beauty. Sometimes I tell others the stories in my screenplays, and I ask: ‘Did I make it up, or is it the truth?’ Every...

b. March, 18, 1933, London “I'll always be around because I'm a skilled professional actor. Whether or not I've any talent is beside the point.” – Michael Caine Sir Michael Caine, one of the most durable act...

“There is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.” – Douglas Sirk  Shockproof (Douglas Sirk, 1949) has always be...

Fritz Lang’s penultimate American film, While the City Sleeps (1956), is a serial killer drama, much like Lang’s classic film M (1931). Robert Manners (John Drew Barrymore), a young man on the prowl, terrorizes...

One of the legendary figures of the American cinema, the late Monte Hellman (1929 – 2021) is best known for directing Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), considered by many to be the definitive “road movie,” but Hellman’...

Luchino Visconti’s La caduta degli dei (The Damned, 1969) is such an outrageously excessive and daring film that one wonders, in retrospect, how Visconti got away with it. Even the film’s trailer is over the t...

In the 1960s, the experimental cinema scene was exploding on a world wide basis. In the era before digital technology, cellphones and email, film was seen as the most immediate and accessible art form, one that...

There are so many moments in the cinema when pop music takes over the image on the screen that I can’t possibly confine myself to one, so here are just a few instances that linger in my memory. There’s Bruce Co...

In 1959, just four years before his death from a heart attack, Jean Cocteau knew that his time was running out after years of ill health, opium addiction, and a vagabond life that depended on the kindness of st...

The prolific Canadian director Denis Côté has a new film out, entitled (in English; see below for more on this) Ghost Town Anthology (2019), which has been shown on the festival circuit around the world, and is...

It’s been an interesting experience, to say the least. I’ve spent most of my time making movies, rather than watching them, as you can see here, and participating in online film festivals, Zoom sessions and the...

We’ve seen this scenario before, but only in the cinema: a mysterious plague, for which there is no cure, suddenly appears out of nowhere and ravages the globe. In everything from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh S...

There’s an overwhelming sense of stasis in the images of Strategia del ragno (The Spider’s Stratagem, 1970), as the film effortlessly embraces both nature (the beauty of the Italian countryside; the summer tree...

To understand what the last ten years of cinema have been about, one has to start at the turn of the last century – the year 2000 – when Hollywood decided that it was time to get rid of film itself, and make th...

Sidney Hayers’ Night of the Eagle (1962) was based on the 1943 Fritz Leiber novel Conjure Wife, which had been filmed once before by Universal as Weird Woman (Reginald Le Borg, 1944), one of its “Inner Sanctum”...

The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961) is one of the screen’s supreme ghost stories, and also one of the last great films shot in black-and-white CinemaScope by the gifted cinematographer Freddie Francis. It is, of...

“Whether we like it or not, it (death) will come one day, but generally people are not in a hurry, and I personally have never been in a hurry in my life; this is perhaps why I reached this age.” – Manoel de...

While Ida Lupino is best known for the seven feature films that bear her name as director – the out-of-wedlock pregnancy drama Not Wanted (1949), which she took over from an ailing Elmer Clifton; Never Fear (19...

Orlacs Hände (The Hands of Orlac), directed by Robert Wiene in 1924 from the eponymous 1920 novel by French author Maurice Renard, has been re-adapted numerous times under various titles, and even as a straight...

François Truffaut’s second feature film after his career-defining debut Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows, 1959), Tirez sur le pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player, 1960) is a cheerfully ramshackle affair, alte...

The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968) by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet is a film almost unlike any other. Starring classical harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt as Bach, the film tracks the composer t...

Budd Boetticher (pronounced “bettiker”) was primarily known for his work as a director in the Western genre, but I didn’t want to tell him that. Boetticher refused to be pinned down with any labels, and describ...

The Forgotten Master of Film Noir Born: 2 July 1908 Died: 12 December 1985 Director Phil Karlson’s best films - Tight Spot (1955), Five Against the House (1955), The Brothers Rico (1957), Hell to Eternity (1...

The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond occupies a curious place in the canon of Budd Boetticher’s work. Though he directed a few films with criminal elements, such as his superb thriller The Killer is Loose (1956), ...

For most of his long career, Éric Rohmer created a series of ‘moral investigations’ that were resolutely spare and enigmatic in their construction, dealing with matters of the heart, personal intrigues and disa...

When the cinema was first invented, women were responsible for some of the major breakthroughs in the medium, and often advanced to the director’s chair. Such early figures as Alice Guy, Ida May Park, Cleo Madi...

With the enormous worldwide success of his film La Dolce Vita (1960), Federico Fellini consolidated his reputation as a filmmaker of the first rank. No other film has so pitilessly examined the failure of celeb...

BFI’s Flipside series continues with another excellent release, a completely restored version of Don Sharp’s “zombie biker” film Psychomania (1973), starring George Sanders in his last role, with capable assist...

I’ve always had a curious affection for George Hoellering’s 1951 film adaptation of T.S. Eliot’s verse play Murder in the Cathedral. Eliot composed it as a stage play in 1935, with the first performance taking ...

“Rockin’ the Boat’s a Drag. You Gotta Sink the Boat!”: Robert Downey Sr.’s Anarchist Cinema b. 24 June 1936, New York City, United States Long, long, long ago and very far away, in Manhattan in the 1960s, I k...

“Oh, ethics . . . ethics . . . ethics! That's all I've heard. Isn't there any ethics about letting poor little babies be murdered?” – Barbara Stanwyck as nurse Lora Hart in Night Nurse. There are precious f...

Feature image: Welcome To This House Barbara Hammer’s Welcome to This House: A Film on Elizabeth Bishop (2015) is that rarity among documentary films – rather than the usual succession of talking heads, shot i...

Denis Côté is a young Canadian filmmaker who has burst onto the international film scene with a group of challenging and innovative movies in the past few years. Born 16 November, 1973 in New Brunswick, Canada,...

Like so many others in the United States, I was first exposed to Karel Zeman’s exotic adventure film Vynález zkázy (Invention of Destruction, 1958), when it was released in the West in a dubbed and retitled as ...

Adam Sandler has become such a reliable conveyor belt of cinematic schlock that people forget he once had aspirations beyond Dennis Dugan’s truly dreadful film Jack and Jill (2011), in which Sandler plays both ...