If there are two characteristics defining director of photography Sandi Sissel’s work, they are versatility and realism. Sissel began her career in the documentary field, shooting countless hours of footage for NBC and ABC News as well as 60 Minutes, and she has continued working in the non-fiction form on dozens of highly acclaimed films for PBS (Before Stonewall, Witness to War), HBO (Jane Goodall: Chimps So Like Us), and Disney (Endurance, for which Sissel received a BAFTA nomination). Concurrently with her non-fiction work, Sissel has forged a career as a superb narrative cinematographer; her acclaimed feature debut, Mira Nair’s […]

In 1985, a pair of brothers who owned a video equipment rental business in Chicago offered local filmmaker John McNaughton $100,000 in financing if he could come up with a low-budget horror movie. They probably got a little more than they bargained for when McNaughton delivered Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, a chilling (though also blackly comic) character study loosely based on the experiences of real life sociopath Henry Lee Lucas. McNaughton eschewed slasher movie conventions in favor of an ultra-realistic, serious-minded film with no escape hatch for the audience; one of the greatest cinematic representations of the banality […]

Writer-director Keith Gordon had one of the best film schools imaginable in the late ’70s and early ’80s, when he broke into the business as an actor and appeared in several now classic movies including All That Jazz, Dressed to Kill, and Christine. He must have learned quite a bit watching the likes of Fosse, De Palma, and Carpenter direct, because his own filmography is one of the most consistent in all of contemporary American cinema. Gordon has directed five features to date, every single one of which is an uncompromised treasure – and each one is different from the […]

Has there ever been another summer for American movies like the summer of 1982? From the release of John Milius’s Conan the Barbarian on May 14 to the exploitation double-whammy of Class of 1984 and The Beastmaster on August 20, virtually every week saw the release of one or more spectacularly enjoyable films across a wide array of genres. The summer gave us a pair of Spielberg classics (E.T., Poltergeist) and numerous seminal science fiction films (Blade Runner and John Carpenter’s The Thing were released on the same day); teen comedies both high (Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Last […]

In September 1990, the American cinema changed forever when Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas exploded onto the country’s multiplex screens. I’ve written elsewhere about that film’s influence and impact, which was so massive that its unfortunate side effect was to eclipse several other excellent mob films that were released at the same time. Indeed, the period was a remarkable one for terrific gangster movies – Miller’s Crossing, King of New York, Men of Respect, and The Godfather, Part III all premiered in the fall of 1990. To varying degrees time has been kind to all of these films, but none has aged […]

I first became aware of cinematographer Darren Genet when I encountered his work on All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, a surprisingly lyrical and beautiful horror film that had more in common with the work of Terrence Malick and ’70s-era Peter Bogdanovich than with other teen slasher films. Awestruck by Genet’s visual originality and technical precision, I continued to follow his work as he ventured into television (CSI: Miami) and continued to evolve as a feature cinematographer on films like Jada Pinkett Smith’s criminally underrated directorial debut, The Human Contract. That film exhibits all of Genet’s strengths: a bold and […]

A holy grail for both cinephiles and rock and roll enthusiasts finally arrives on DVD this week in the form of Shout Factory’s superbly assembled The Decline of Western Civilization boxed set. The first two Decline films are essential artifacts of the late ’70s punk rock movement and the ’80s metal scene in Los Angeles; the third, made in the ’90s, is a sober chronicle of Hollywood’s gutter punks, homeless kids tossed aside by “polite” society. All three movies contain terrific concert footage of seminal punk and metal bands (including Fear, the Circle Jerks, and Faster Pussycat, among many others) […]

With Burying the Ex (opening theatrically and on VOD June 19), one of the greatest directors of the past forty years returns to the style that made him famous while also striking out in immensely entertaining new directions. Joe Dante’s first film, the Roger Corman-financed Hollywood Boulevard (co-directed with Allan Arkush), established him as a singular satirical voice; like many of the films that would follow (The Howling, Gremlins and Gremlins 2, Matinee, etc.), it was both a celebration of and a sly commentary on American pop culture, with a delirious wit and energy masking an underlying seriousness. Over the […]

In the mid-1980s, actor and comedian Robert Townsend had scored supporting roles in films like A Soldier’s Story and Streets of Fire, but was still limited in the opportunities available to him as a black performer. Frustrated by the lack of roles, Townsend created one for himself – and directed a landmark in American independent cinema in the process – by helming Hollywood Shuffle, a self-financed comedy about a young actor whose experiences mirrored Townsend’s own. Bobby Taylor (Townsend) is an aspiring thespian who dreams of playing superheroes and Shakespearean kings but mostly finds himself auditioning to play pimps and […]

In the mid-1980s, Martin Scorsese was regaining his footing as a director after a brutal few years. His passion project, The Last Temptation of Christ, had fallen apart at Paramount just days before production was scheduled to begin, and The King of Comedy had been a commercial, and largely critical, failure – in spite of the fact that it was, and is, one of the most incisive films ever made about celebrity culture. After years of working on studio movies with substantial budgets and luxurious schedules, Scorsese went back to ground zero for After Hours in 1985, stripping his methods […]