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Filmmakers/authors discuss the movies they wish more people were familiar with.

Movies Referenced In This Episode

Eurocrime! The Italian Cop and Gangster Films That Ruled the ’70s (2012)

Live Like A Cop, Die Like A Man (1976)

Island of Lost Souls (1932)

Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau (2014)

Top Gun (1986)

Water Power (1977)

Taxi Driver (1976)

In Fabric (2018)

A Climax of Blue Power (1974)

Forced Entry (1975)

Once Upon A Time In America (1984)

Nashville Girl (1976)

Ms .45 (1981)

Act of Vengeance a.k.a. Rape Squad (1974)

High Plains Drifter (1973)

Design For Living (1933)

Trouble In Paradise (1932)

Melody (1971)

Oliver! (1968)

Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

That’ll Be The Day (1973)

Stardust (1974)

The Errand Boy (1961)

Looney Tunes: Back In Action (2003)

The Bellboy (1960)

Which Way To The Front? (1970)

Hardly Working (1980)

A Night In Casablanca (1946)

The Cocoanuts (1929)

Duck Soup (1933)

Boeing Boeing (1965)

Confessions of a Young American Housewife (1974)

Cockfighter (1974)

The Second Civil War (1997)

I, A Woman (1965)

The Devil At Your Heels (1981)

The...

Dazzling urbanites of the New York persuasion will no doubt wend their way to MoMA's season of Argentinian noirs in February, seeking the familiar, morally-compromised pleasures of noir in an exotic new form. They will enjoy Carlos Hugo Christensen's Cornell Woolrich adaptations, subject of a previous Forgotten, the great, underrated French filmmaker Pierre Chenal's version of Native Son, and early work by Hugo Fregonese, later a decent Hollywood journeyman who made one classic for Val Lewton (eerie siege western Apache Drums).But they'll also get the chance to see a stylish remake of Fritz Lang's M, which is as free with its source material as Joseph Losey's recently reappraised 1951 version, and which might almost have cut its ties to its German role model to make its own way as an original work. It's faintly disappointing whenever its plot reconnects with Thea Von Harbou's masterly 1931 scenario,...

How would you program this year's newest, most interesting films into double features with movies of the past you saw in 2015?Looking back over the year at what films moved and impressed us, it is clear that watching old films is a crucial part of making new films meaningful. Thus, the annual tradition of our end of year poll, which calls upon our writers to pick both a new and an old film: they were challenged to choose a new film they saw in 2015—in theatres or at a festival—and creatively pair it with an old film they also saw in 2015 to create a unique double feature.All the contributors were given the option to write some text explaining their 2015 fantasy double feature. What's more, each writer was given the option to list more pairings, with or without explanation, as further imaginative film programming we'd be lucky to catch...

Many—maybe too many, looking at this bunch of bone-tired warriors of Av-virtue—were the travels the Ferroni Brigade embarked on all through 2011: oftentimes for festivals all over Europe, sometimes for visits to this archive or that as part of our programming arbeit (to be read with a Japanese drawl). During those months in the dark, we saw a lot—some of which chimed and rhymed with new works we encountered in this multiplex back home or that gallery abroad, on this collector's Steenbeck or in that producer's private projection room (they still exist).

On one of those trips, we were joined by our main Mubi-man, His Kasness a.k.a. the Kasest with whom we plunged one evening into a brainstorming on what The Festival would look and feel like (truth be told: it was more like a communal delirium—but what do you expect from folks sitting...

Acknowledging Apache Drums (1951) as the forgotten Val Lewton movie, we must also acknowledge that it's not quite as special as Cat People or Isle of the Dead or any of the others in the chiller cycle, but it does bear comparison with the lesser-known Mademoiselle Fifi and it certainly beats the pants off of Youth Runs Wild.

If the conservative nature of the western format reins in some of Lewton's more sophisticated tendencies, it also allows others to stand out in bold relief, and if director Hugo Fregonese is no Jacques Tourneur, nor even a Mark Robson, he's a perfectly amicable journeyman.

Admitting a certain B-movie banality, what's striking is how Lewton is able to continue his preoccupations into what might seem an alien genre, so that Apache Drums resembles, at numerous times, a supernatural/psychological horror movie, in which the horror is dually located in the American Indian "other,...