Author Adrian Danks

In Greek mythology, Orpheus is a talented musician who travels to the underworld to bring back his dead wife, Eurydice. Upon entering the realm of the undead, the mournful music that Orpheus sings and plucks fr...

Les Parents terribles begins with hand-drawn animation of a theatre curtain rising to reveal not a stage, or even a wide shot, but a jarring close-up of the bizarre Georges (Marcel André) in a scuba mask, aimin...

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...

“City images are historical creations, and are often more resistant to change than the modernisers anticipate, although the resistance may be stronger at some times than others.”- Graeme Davison Stanley Kr...

Come and See (1985 Soviet Union 142 mins) Source: AFTRS Prod, Dir: Elem Klimov Scr: Klimov and Ales Adamovich Phot: Alexei Rodionov Mus: O. Yanchenko, Mozart Cast: Alexei Kravchenko, Olga Mironova, Ly...

The careers of Raoul Walsh and James Cagney were never quite the same after White Heat (1949). As various commentators have suggested, this propulsive, machine-tooled, sardonically funny and often-brutal crime ...