Author Spotlight

Geoffrey O’Brien

Geoffrey O’Brien’s books include The Phantom Empire; Sonata for Jukebox; The Fall of the House of Walworth; Stolen Glimpses, Captive Shadows: Writing on Film, 2002–2012; Where Did Poetry Come From: Some Early Encounters; and Arabian Nights of 1934.

36 Results
“The House Is the Monster”: Roger Corman’s Poe Cycle

In the great American writer’s Gothic tales, Corman found themes that inspired him to riff, invent, and create immersive cinematic environments.

By Geoffrey O’Brien

The Incredible Shrinking Man: Other Dimensions

This uncanny tale of existential anxiety stands out as the most rigorously pared-down American science-fiction film of the 1950s.

By Geoffrey O’Brien

Songbook

To the Tune of Mortality: “The Gondola Song” in Ikiru

A ballad from the 1910s becomes a precarious way station between life and death in Akira Kurosawa’s portrait of an ordinary man’s final days.

By Geoffrey O’Brien

The Irishman: The Wages of Loyalty

Sprawling across more than half a century of American history, Martin Scorsese’s crime saga combines epic ambition with a mood of isolation and dissolution.

By Geoffrey O’Brien

The Lady Eve: Sweet Revenge

Hollywood has never produced a comedy more acutely witty, more sexually playful, or more unexpectedly moving than this flawlessly engineered masterpiece by Preston Sturges.

By Geoffrey O’Brien

The Story of Temple Drake: Notorious

Often credited with inciting full enforcement of the Hays Code, this harrowing melodrama is one of the few Faulkner adaptations that successfully evokes the writer’s distinctive ambience and unsettling contradictions.

By Geoffrey O’Brien

The Master’s First Steps

In the string of early-career triumphs that established him as the Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock captured his native England with a tactile immediacy.

By Geoffrey O’Brien

The Magnificent Ambersons

Echoes of Tarkington

Unlike his adaptations of Shakespeare and Kafka, Orson Welles’s take on a Pulitzer Prize winner by Booth Tarkington is remarkably faithful to its source.

By Geoffrey O’Brien

The Age of Innocence: Savage Civility

Martin Scorsese brought his trademark attentiveness to the intricacies of social custom to this devastating adaptation of an Edith Wharton novel.

By Geoffrey O’Brien

Othello: In Pieces

The result of a tumultuous production, Orson Welles’s eccentric take on Othello infuses the play with a convulsive rhythm and disorienting sense of abstraction.

By Geoffrey O’Brien

Barry Lyndon: Time Regained

In this lavishly mounted epic, Stanley Kubrick captures the ghostly ephemerality of a vanishing world with paradoxical immediacy.

By Geoffrey O’Brien

The Asphalt Jungle: “A Left-Handed Form of Human Endeavor”

John Huston’s meticulously calibrated crime film combines nail-biting suspense with a mood of Chekhovian regret.

By Geoffrey O’Brien

Cat People: Darkness Betrayed

Cloaked in chiaroscuro and innuendo, this stylistically innovative creature feature leaves its greatest horrors to the imagination.

By Geoffrey O’Brien

Kwaidan: No Way Out

Masaki Kobayashi takes on broken vows and the unreality of the past in his sensual and spooky four-part adaptation of Lafcadio Hearn’s Japanese folktales.

By Geoffrey O’Brien

Moonrise Kingdom: Awakenings

Two precocious youngsters try to carve out a corner of the world just for themselves in Wes Anderson’s alternately melancholy and boisterous tale of growing pains.

By Geoffrey O’Brien

The Killers: A Decisive Reversal of Values
Our recollections of Robert Siodmak’s 1946 movie The Killers are apt to center on three primary elements: Ernest Hemingway’s story, so literally brought to the screen in the film’s opening scenes; Ava Gardner, carrying the full weight of that l…

By Geoffrey O’Brien

Le silence de la mer: Stranger in the House

In his first feature, Jean-Pierre Melville found subtly radical ways to adapt Vercors's underground French novel about quiet resistance against the German occupation.

By Geoffrey O’Brien

The Sword of Doom: Calligraphy in Blood
Kihachi Okamoto's The Sword of Doom is likely to strike the unalerted viewer as an exercise in absurdist violence, tracking the career of a nihilistic swordsman from his gratuitous murder of a defenseless old man to his final descent into what looks …

By Geoffrey O’Brien

The Secret Heart of Judex

Georges Franju evokes the surreal silent serials of Louis Feuillade while constructing his own personal cinematic paradise.

By Geoffrey O’Brien

Red River: The Longest Drive

Howard Hawks was both a skillful Hollywood craftsman and a deeply personal artist, and this western of uncommon wit and grandeur is among his greatest and quirkiest films.

By Geoffrey O’Brien

On the Road with Zatoichi

He massages, he gambles, and he’s great with a blade. Who is this blind swordsman, anyway?

By Geoffrey O’Brien

To Be or Not to Be: The Play’s the Thing

Ernst Lubitsch’s World War II–era high-wire act is a profound take on the absurdity cruelty of civilization and a perfect black comedy to boot.

By Geoffrey O’Brien

Things to Come: Whither Mankind?

The prophetic voice of H. G. Wells resonates throughout this singularly ambitious, spectacularly designed vision.

By Geoffrey O’Brien

Purple Noon: In Broad Sunlight

In René Clément’s sparkling but menacing anti-noir, the Mediterranean setting is as seductive as Alain Delon’s baby blues.

By Geoffrey O’Brien