Megan Abbott

Inspired by Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella Traumnovelle, Stanley Kubrick’s final film is a deeply personal examination of the fragility of marriage and the destructive power of sexual fantasy.

The acclaimed crime writer joins a producer of the 1999 adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley to discuss the cinematic incarnations of Patricia Highsmith’s shape-shifting, quintessentially American antihero.

Despite the harsh critical drubbing it received upon its release in 1960, Michael Powell’s lurid tale of obsession and violence is now widely regarded as a masterpiece—and as a key inspiration for an entire subgenre of “slasher” movies.

In this Technicolor film noir masterpiece, Gene Tierney stars as one of cinema’s most dangerous and sympathetic femmes fatales, a woman who finds it impossible to conform to postwar gender roles.

Sofia Coppola lets us behind closed doors in ways that are beyond the imagining of the novel’s boy narrators.

Peter Weir’s sun-dappled, sexually charged nightmare about a disappearance in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Australia still unnerves due to its radical lack of resolution.