Article
There's a curious thing that happens when you mention 90s thrillers in conversation: someone always pipes up with the same two or three titles, and everyone nods knowingly. The decade produced a genuine renaissance in the form, a moment when intelligent action cinema and psychological tension went hand
Rating: 2.5★
Robert Bresson occupies a singular position in the French cinema canon, a director so committed to his own aesthetic principles that his films feel less like conventional narratives and more like philosophical arguments made in moving images. By the time Pickpocket arrived in 1959, Bresson had already established himself as
Rating: 3.0★
By 2019, the Fast & Furious franchise had spent nearly two decades transforming itself from a moderately budgeted street-racing thriller into one of Hollywood's most reliably enormous franchises, complete with international espionage, orbital satellites, and a mythology so dense it practically requires a flow chart to follow.
Rating: 3.5★
By 1935, Alfred Hitchcock was already the most talked-about director working in British cinema, but he had not yet made the leap to Hollywood that would define the later arc of his reputation. The 39 Steps arrived at a particular sweet spot: sound pictures were a settled fact rather
Rating: 3.0★
February 1939 marked one of the most desperate mass movements of people in modern European history. As Franco's Nationalist forces closed in on the last Republican strongholds in Catalonia, somewhere between 400,000 and 500,000 Spanish civilians and soldiers crossed the Pyrenees into France in a matter
2010s
There are films that tell stories, and there are films that simply bear witness. Amazing Grace belongs firmly in the second category, and the story of how it came to exist at all is almost as remarkable as what ended up on screen. In January 1972, Aretha Franklin returned to
Rating: 3.0★
The legend of Robin Hood has been retold so many times, in so many formats, that every new version carries the weight of all the ones before it. By the time Kevin Reynolds brought his take to cinemas in the summer of 1991, audiences had already seen Errol Flynn swing
Rating: 3.0★
There was a time, roughly bookended by the anxieties of Y2K and the seismic shock of September 2001, when Hollywood found itself drawn to stories about ordinary people caught in systems they could neither escape nor fully understand. Phone Booth arrives squarely in that window, released in 2002 after a
1980s
Abbas Kiarostami is one of those filmmakers whose reputation tends to precede him in a slightly intimidating way. Celebrated across European festival circuits and academic film culture from the late 1980s onward, the Iranian director built a body of work that consistently turned modest, everyday subjects into something that critics
Rating: 2.0★
By 2017, the Fast and Furious franchise had travelled a considerable distance from its origins as a moderately budgeted thriller about street racing and DVD piracy. Starting life with The Fast and the Furious back in 2001, the series had reinvented itself several times over, swelling from heist caper to
Rating: 2.5★
By the time Furious 7 arrived in cinemas in April 2015, the franchise that began with a modest street-racing film set in Los Angeles had become one of the biggest commercial properties on the planet. What The Fast and the Furious (2001) started as a fairly contained, if enjoyably
Rating: 2.0★
By 2013, the Fast and Furious franchise had become one of Hollywood's more unlikely success stories. What started as a fairly modest, street-racing thriller set in the sun-bleached suburbs of Los Angeles had, over the course of a decade and five films, mutated into a full-
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