18 Apr 2012
Within the Sound of Silence - The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967)
“Ben, what are you doing?” his father asks from the side of the pool, the first line of dialogue for nearly five minutes, to which Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) leans up from his...
9 Feb 2012
Tender Noir - Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944)
In his justly maligned yet influential 'Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962', Andrew Sarris praised American cinema for the fact that "a director is forced to express his person...
12 Jan 2012
An Unsettling World - Caché/Hidden (Michael Haneke, 2005)
This may not be the most uplifting image, the most iconic or important image in popular culture, but it is impossible to forget for th...
1 Dec 2011
Join Us! – Troll 2 (Claudio Fragasso, 1990)
The above still from Troll 2 is for me an indelible image representing the true magic of cinema. Cinema magic should not be special effects, or well written scenes, or great performances. The tr...
7 Nov 2011
‘I got the Bullets’ - Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955)
James Dean, the first American teenager and enduring movie icon. What makes this particular image of the star so iconic?
The image, from Rebel Without a Cause, was release...
19 Oct 2011
'A New Beginning' The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)
Many endings exist in order to make way for a new beginning. This is true of one of the most iconic images in all cinema, that of the final scene of John Ford’s The Searc...
5 Oct 2011
Projecting Strength in Robocop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987)
Drawing upon the framing and composition of the Western shoot-out, the expressionist use of light and shadows in film noir and evoking the spectacle of giant-monster B-movies, this ima...
27 Sep 2011
‘Here’s Johnny!’ - The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
Jack Nicholson is playing Jack Torrance, the ‘caretaker’ of the isolated Overlook Hotel in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. He has slashed a hole with an axe through the bathroom door...
19 Sep 2011
Is there one image from a movie that it is impossible to forget? An indelible image that has come to represent everything that is important about the movie? Or one that holds new meanings beyond the film’s imaginings? Here we c...