Sam Peckinpah’s The Killer Elite (1975) sounds like a winner on paper: James Caan and Robert Duvall in a revenge thriller/spy movie? The film’s first forty minutes place the film on an extremely strong foundation. The two […]
By DREW MORTON Five years ago, I wrote a retrospective on film noir for Pajiba by honing down my favorite film genre (or movement or mode – depending on who you’re talking to) to the Top Five […]
By DREW MORTON The embodiment of America – John Wayne – plays a fish out of water Chicago police detective sent to London to extradite a gangster (John Vernon) in Brannigan (1975). The film is essentially one of […]
By Drew Morton It is the summer of 1996. I’m twelve years old and I’m standing in our driveway with my brother, my cousins, and a boxy VHS camcorder mounted on a tripod. We’ve just […]
In his book Hollywood Genres, film scholar Thomas Schatz mobilizes an evolutionary model to describe film genres. For simplicity sake, Schatz posits that a genre essentially moves from classical to baroque in its style and conventions […]
I spent May of 2013 in Paris, shacking up in a friend’s apartment near the Bastille while he was at the Cannes Film Festival. I had been fetishizing such a Parisian vacation for almost a […]
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