Author Spotlight

Danny Peary

Danny Peary is the author of Cult Movies and has written film criticism for such publications as Focus on Film, the Velvet Light Trap, and Newsday.

8 Results
Diabolique
After finishing Diabolique, heralded French director-screenwriter Henri-Georges Clouzot (1907–1977) confessed that all he had intended was to make a picture that would “amuse myself” and please a young girl who hid under the covers and asked he…

By Danny Peary

Burn!

This rarely seen, overlooked gem, featuring what may be one of Marlon Brando’s most fascinating characterizations, was Gillo Pontecorvo’s worthy follow-up to his political masterpiece The Battle of Algiers. The brilliant radical Italian director

By Danny Peary

The Wages of Fear
One of cinema’s most revered thrillers, La Saliare de la Peur or The Wages of Fear is the acknowledged masterpiece of the brilliant French director Henri-Georges Clouzot (1907-77). It is also the film that made popular music hall singer Yves Montan…

By Danny Peary

Shampoo

Hal Ashby’s witty post-Nixon comedy shocked viewers in 1975 with its sexual activity and the taboo-breaking language.

By Danny Peary

Bad Day at Black Rock
It is 1945. For the first time in four years, the Southern Pacific stops in Black Rock.  A one-armed man named John J. MacReedy (Spencer Tracy) steps off the train. This brooding stranger makes the few residents who inhabit the town’s tumble-d…

By Danny Peary

The Last Picture Show

For only his second studio film, Peter Bogdanovich chanced directing an adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s elegiac novel about teenagers who come of age in a dying Texas town in the early fifties.

By Danny Peary

That Obscure Object of Desire

Luis Buñuel’s ode to obsessive love is injected with the biting subversive wit, symbolism, originality and surreal touches that distinguish his finest achievements.

By Danny Peary

The Lacemaker

Isabelle Huppert shot from minor actress to full-fledged French star with a mesmerizing performance as, ironically, a young woman who is incapable of escaping anonymity. In Swiss director Claude Goretta’s elegant, beautifully observed tragedy/chara

By Danny Peary