Another talented chip off the German Expressionist block, F. W. Murnau had a penchant for horror. With "Nosferatu" (1922) he brought the first of countless Count Dracula stories to cinematic light. Murnau made his Dracula as hideous, doomed, and gloomy as later incarnations are suave, elegant, and ta

Classic hollywood, Dark, Death, Elegant, Erotic, German expressionist film, Grotesque, Primal

After Goebbels made him an offer he couldn't refuse without unpleasant repercussions, celebrated German director Fritz Lang fled the new Nazi regime rather than supervise National Socialist Party motion pictures. Lang, a member-in-good-standing of the German Gothic school of Expressionist cinema, cut

Dark, Dystopia and its discontents, Dystopic, Germans in hollywood, Machinistic, Mathematical, Urban

Recognized as a comic genius equal to Chaplin, Keaton had a style that assembled as much mechanical grace and Rube Goldberg gags as the Tramp's, but without the sentimentality or didacticism. His final visual pun in "The General" -- kissing his sweetheart while they use the horizontal wheel-joints of

Classic hollywood, Funny, Illusive, In-your-face, Kinetic, Trippy, Wise assy

Whether you find them aesthetically refreshing or merely overindulgent, the films of British avant-gardist Derek Jarman always present either visual or emotional surprises. A restlessly inventive film artist and painter, Jarman railed against the conventional stuffiness of what passed for art in his

Experimental, Homoerotic, Pioneering, Political, Psychological, Queer