The Cinephile

Actor-director Kevin Costner is an iconic fixture in American cinema. At 60, he still bears a neo-Gary Cooper, or, some would say, James Stewart, quality. With an understated “aw shucks, ma’am” quality you can’t get […]

The film noir genre is on dark, velvety display in such films as The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Big Sleep (1946),The Postman Always Rings Twice (adapted in seven different films since 1946). But director Billy […]

When Christians make movies about saints, they sometimes succeed as hagiography, always make their intended audiences feel good, and almost always fail as art. Christians often can’t resist the temptation to tell the story with […]

Few movies can be at once savage and sweet; fewer still while straddling more than one genre. Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960) manages all of the above. Dubbed a comedy at its debut, this study […]

The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The Sound of Music marked the culmination of creativity by the team that wrote Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, and The King and I. It also marked the end of an era. In a […]

Some movies linger in your spirit for long stretches. They put you in a trance—disturbed, humorous, or charmed, depending. You re-watch them (let’s call them atmospheric films) and the trance returns thicker, and even more […]

Bring to mind a scene from a Frank Capra movie: a good man stricken with despair stands at a great height pondering suicide; the snow falls softly all around; it’s Christmas Eve. No, not It’s […]

The shaking bed. The frantic mother. The faithless priest duking it out with the demon upstairs—and oh, that spinning head. These and other iconic images from The Exorcist (1973) are burned into our collective movie-going […]