Author Wheeler Winston Dixon

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...