Yes! SUSPENSE alone likely taught a thing or two to many of the directors on this list.

I love DEEP CRIMSON, which I think succeeds by being largely about what brings the central couple together - a needy sense of shared insecurities and flaws. Screenwriter Paz Alicia Garciadiego and director Arturo Ripstein have a keen eye for their twisted love, and it is clear the murders, though grisly, occupy far…

If it were in Italian, the acronym would have to come close to "vaffanculo."

Will this be the start of a Fellini cinematic universe? An FCU?

Hard to pick my favorite, but I want to give a shout-out to OBSESSION, De Palma's most direct riff on VERTIGO. Another great Bernard Herrmann score (his last one), gorgeous Vilmos Zsigmond cinematography, and it contains, in fact, De Palma's very first use of sumptuous slow motion (it was released a few months before…

I feel like I understand McCown's worries about del Toro's work in general. As an enormous fan, I also can't shake the dissonance between what I see as the great potential of many of his ideas, and how underwhelming they seem in their execution. There's real power and beauty in many of his films, but there are also…

The essay mentions THE WHITE RIBBON, which is bleak but already showed signs of warmth and un-ironic love in Haneke. I'm speaking of the relationship between the Teacher and Eva. I remember expecting some violent twist to their courtship (more on that below), but it actually panned out with genuine affection. As a…

I actually prefer this to STREETCAR. As plays, I like STREETCAR better, but in terms of the movie adaptations, I found this more surprising and memorable.

http://screenrant.com/heat-…

Right, this is one of the many bits of Ward's story pitch that didn't make sense to the ALIEN 3 producers. Ward imagined that the planet that was this people's home had to be human-made, and he thought of it as a piece of very archaic technology - no metal, no circuitry, only wood. For him it provided a striking set…

The religious inquiry in this film and the idea of carrying it out in a medieval-like setting in another planet reminds me of Vincent Ward's original vision for ALIEN 3. In his version, Ripley crashes in a wooden planetoid populated by what appears to be a religious order that zealously rejects technology and…

I believe this was going to be a Brian De Palma film at one point. He often embraces silliness and in his best movies, the silliness actually works in the film's favor.

Yes, I had a similar feeling. I still liked it a lot because the set up is so intriguing and the film just looks fantastic. The pairing of production designer Dean Tavoularis and cinematographer Darius Khondji worked like gangbusters. But my favorite part is perhaps the late, great Wojciech Kilar music score - creepy…

The one's I've read suggest you're right (I haven't read too many, to be honest). I remember a critic who pointed out the film was Polanski's second direct "flirtation" with satanic material (I think "flirtation" is the word he used, and I haven't found the review online to corroborate that) after ROSEMARY'S BABY, and…

Is it the third act that gives it away? Or the fight scene where Johnny Depp tries to prevent Lena Olin from biting him while struggling to pull his pants up? Or even during Allen Garfield's appearance right in the second scene?

He was quite good and subdued in THE NINTH GATE (1999). I thought he made the character, a mercenary book dealer and bibliophile, subtly cool in his geekiness.

One might say that that movie could be evidence for the case that their shows work best when experienced live and not when recorded, even if the filmmakers gave viewers perspectives on the performances that are not possible on the stage show.

No one in the AV CLUB is looking forward to CRIMSON PEAK?

THE STRANGE COLOR OF YOUR BODY'S TEARS contains a couple of passages that are fresher in my memory than many scenes from other movies this year: the sequence where the protagonist multiplies himself as he wakes up over and over again, and the black-and-white, stop-motion stalking of a woman by a leather-clad, hatted…

Brilliant. What is missing, though, is having Herzog's thoughts delivered in his own unmistakable voice.