On Friday, May 20, influential independent film distributor Donald Krim died after a year-long battle with cancer. For 33 years, Don was the president of Kino International Corp, which specialized in contemporary international films as well as classic Hollywood titles.  Most famously Kino was the distributor of the restored Metropolis, which had its North American […]

On May 13, 2011, documentary filmmaker Bruce Ricker died peacefully in Cambridge, Mass., at the age of 68. Frequent TCM viewers may recognize the name from such feature-length profile films as Dave Brubeck: In His Own Sweet Way (which premiered on TCM in December, 2010), Johnny Mercer: “The Dream’s on Me” (2009), and Budd Boetticher: […]

The popularity of many vintage films wax and wane, but there are some films that have such a loyal, cultish following that they seem to only gain notoriety with the passage of time.  Such a film is Nightmare Alley. It wasn’t issued on video until 2005, but its reputation was rock solid long before it […]

It has been called “a virtual social H-bomb,” and it detonated at a press conference in New York on September 12, 1957.  Advertising researcher James M. Vicary announced that he had successfully tested a device that could implant subliminal messages in the minds of moviegoers.  Vicary, Rene Bras, and Francis C. Thayer were partners in […]

Everyone has seen them, but not everyone has noticed them.  And even fewer fully understand the purpose of the circular scratches that appear about every twenty minutes in a film, like subliminal postage stamps.  They are cue marks (aka cue dots), and they are the projectionist’s friend.  Worldly Morlocks may fully understand the cue mark, […]

Filmmaker bathed in film within the film:  Jared Martin in Murder a la Mod. Usually when one dips into the earliest works of a well-known director, one can only hope to find mere traces of the filmmaker’s gestating style.  In the case of Brian De Palma’s Murder a la Mod (1967), the opposite is true. […]