Robert C. Cumbow

The film is a coup in Bigelow’s early exploration of men’s love of themselves and one another.

The power of the film is the endurance of an Elvis Presley song (or two), the staying power of a children’s movie, and the sight and sound of a match being struck.

The film was a first sortie for William Peter Blatty’s all-out attack on unbelief in the summer of 1990.

Beginning with Nosferatu, the vampire has been depicted on film largely as a symbol of pestilence visited upon cities. Just as disease wreaks greatest havoc on places of densest population,…

​For many years, I maintained a Top 10 list. It was changing all the time, but by the mid-1980s, I had pretty well nailed it down.

In Scream 2, the question of whether a sequel can be better than the original film becomes a running gag, with participants intermittently suggesting examples. For Wes Craven, it’s just a…

John Carpenter famously commented, “In France, I’m an auteur; in Germany, a filmmaker; in Britain, a genre director; and in the USA, a bum.” Or as another J.C. p…

A busier and more densely populated film than either of George Miller’s first two pared-down, souped-up, post-apocalyptic road epics.

Kasdan’s film, containing respectful homages to a lot of the great westerns, is neither the summing up nor the revival that Kasdan wanted it to be.

For Boorman, the motif of environmental spoliation was never the message but the metaphoric medium for his continuing vision of the human being.

An initially naturalistic depiction of late medieval existence quickly becomes a larger-than-life mixing of history and fantasy.

In 1984 it seemed as if this movie didn’t succeed with anyone except me. For most viewers it was at worst inept, at best the original WTF? experience, long before W…

“Being Catholic means having imagination!” the poet-novelist Gerard Reve replies to a book-club questioner who’s asked how one can still be Catholic in the face of modern science. And R…

In the summer of 1984, I was ready for The Bounty. Though I still can’t tie a knot of any description, don’t know one bit of canvas from another, and…

It’s a film that from the first to the last frame never forgets what it’s about, and remains unrelentingly faithful to its theme throughout.

• Alia, in a transport of ecstasy, holding aloft her crysknife as the Fremen overrun the imperial forces, a nightmarish composition by Lynch out of Bosch, all darkness, and a…

Editor’s Note: The House Next Door is proud to reissue a series of articles developed at 24LiesASecond, a now-defunct platform for provocative criticism with an underdog bite. The essay below…

Editor’s Note: The House Next Door is proud to reissue a series of articles developed at 24LiesASecond, a now-defunct platform for provocative criticism with an underdog bite. The essay below…