Samuel Fuller (1912-1997) carried in him the very spirit of American independent filmmaking. A longtime New Yorker and lifelong workhorse he began as a newspaper copyboy at age 12, was a crime reporter by 17, wrote his first of a dozen pulp novels at 22 – with titles like Test Tube Baby and Burn Baby […]
Author: John Ledingham
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10 Great Acid Westerns To Trip Peyote To
Something was happening to the western in the 1960s and ’70s. The old screen heroes were ageing out and so were their moralities. The Shootist (1976) saw John Wayne confronting his age and mortality, while Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) and Peckinpah’s Pat Garett and Billy the Kid (1973) cast the western’s classical […]
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10 Great Picaresque Movies To Stumble Across The World With
The picaro from the Spanish for ‘rogue’ or ‘rascal’ describes an archetype of hero found in literary classics like Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Voltaire’s Candide and fulfilled in the filmic mainstream by characters like Tom Hanks’ Forrest Gump, that certain brand of travelling everyman to which the world always seems to happen to, and who […]
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10 Great Paranormal Noir Films of The Classic Era
Though initially describing the works of a particular movement of 1940’s and 50’s American crime films, ‘noir’ has come to represent a style derived from those films near ubiquitous in the palette of crime film and fused with all number of styles and genres besides. Originating with an American appropriation of German expressionist aesthetics – […]
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10 Great Road Movies Without Destination
There is something inherently cinematic in the road trip. In the travelogue of sights, in the ever-changing surroundings and continuous road, the compression of space – city after city – and the expansion of time – the monotony of travel itself. In the way travel makes one perpetually a foreigner, newly attuned to each passing […]
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10 Great Anti-Detective Films For The Post-Truth Era
There is a moral in detective fiction perhaps put best by a slogan of The X-Files, a science fictional inheritor of the genre: The Truth is out there. More than the conviction of evidence for extraterrestrial life this is in the context of the show, this phrase also speaks to a belief in objective truth, […]