Lauren Humphries-Brooks is a writer, editor, and media journalist. She holds a Master’s degree in Cinema Studies from New York University, and in Creative Writing from the University of Edinburgh. She regularly contributes to film and pop culture websites, and has written extensively on Classical Hollywood, British horror films, and the sci-fi, fantasy, and horror genres. She currently works as a freelance copyeditor and proofreader.
Based upon an informal poll on my Twitter, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are enough people who have not seen The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to make this one of my recommendations. Because not only is it an essential work of cinema, a historically significant film […]
When we discuss Nazi propaganda films, we usually talk about only two: Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia and Triumph of the Will. Those films are recognizably propaganda—supposed documentaries meant to showcase the power and pomp of Germany under the Nazis. Riefenstahl’s work has become the only mode by which many […]
Just as Douglas Sirk used melodrama as a vehicle (and a partial blind) for social commentary, writer/director Samuel Fuller utilized hardboiled noir and hallucinatory imagery to interrogate the ugly underpinnings of the American psyche. His films are full of sharp-witted prostitutes and strippers, nasty newspaper men, racists and […]
During the holidays, we tend to talk about certain classic films: White Christmas, Holiday Inn, Miracle on 34th Street, Christmas in Connecticut. But let’s also count Douglas Sirk’s fantastic melodrama All That Heaven Allows as a holiday film, not just because a piece of it depicts some chilly […]
French director/comedian Jacques Tati is often mentioned in the same breath as Chaplin and Keaton, though he occupies, for the most part, a different period of history. Tati’s work spans the 1950s to the 1970s, substantially later than Chaplin and Keaton’s work, but he’s operating from much the […]
In 1916, Universal’s most successful film was Where Are My Children?, a film about birth control and abortion made by Lois Weber, a female director who just happened be the first woman elected to the Motion Picture Directors Association, whose name was routinely mentioned alongside D.W. Griffith and […]
I debated putting up yet another Orson Welles recommendation this month, but it is Noirvember and a number of Welles’s films are right now available to stream on Netflix. The Stranger has circulated in public domain prints of varying quality, but it should not therefore be dismissed as […]
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