With an impressive lack of urgency, director Robert Mulligan details the blown last chance of a hardluck guitarist in the languorous Baby the Rain Must Fall (1965). This proto-American New Wave character study embodies its purgatorial southeast Texas setting in elliptical dissolves during which endless vistas bear down to swallow stars Lee Remick and Steve McQueen. Mulligan and screenwriter Horton Foote largely deverbalize the source material, Foote’s play The Traveling Lady, in favor of brooding atmosphere and seething closeups. If…

Featured by Laura Fischer • Read on Screen Slate

Plagued by memories of the cop who ended his killing spree ten years earlier, Mark Trex, aka the Mirror Man, escapes from the state hospital for the criminally insane to seek vengeance. He hitchhikes to New York City on a "quest for the gates of hell," searching for members of the metal band Warriors of the Inferno to fulfill a vision inspired by their lyrics in which Trex, clothed in a…

Featured by Patrick Dahl • Read on Screen Slate

The asthmatic indoor boy who watched Little Italy’s gangsters from his window between television screenings of Howard Hughes films is on full display in American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince (1978), only now he’s a budding big-shot movie director clad in red leather. In this oft-bootlegged but rarely screened documentary, Martin Scorsese is all ears for Prince’s tales of dope dealers, Neil Diamond, and manslaughter. It’s ultimately a hangout film…