The Last Emperor (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1987)

Benardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor  offers no sense of comfort for its titular subject. Its present, set in a post-Mao China, is cast...

Carpenter's Tools: Prince of Darkness

As I work through John Carpenter's corpus, I find myself so taken with his sparse yet impeccable style that I tend to gawk over the deta...

Carpenter's Tools: Big Trouble in Little China

By the time John Carpenter made Big Trouble in Little China , the most successful independent filmmaker of all time had since acclimated int...