A legacy-of-abuse tragedy with heavy psychologizing and moralizing -- altogether as chilly as its upstate New Hampshire locale during deer-hunting season. It showcases ferociously fine work from Nick Nolte as the figurehead policeman of a sleepy small town, not unlike the Stallone character in Copland, who convinces himself that a …

Paul Schrader's Bressonian portrait of a high-priced Beverly Hills gigolo: adolescently admiring and envying, but never very informative or inventive. Less than halfway through the thing, the gigolo's professional life gives way to the more automatically plottable business of a murder frameup, with the gigolo's every step shadowed by unknown …

Paul Schrader recounts the life and death of Bob Crane (1928-78), ephemeral star of TV's Hogan's Heroes, obsessive womanizer (exploits he would copiously document in photographs and on primitive video), and unsolved-murder victim. This is a story of the Dark Side in which the lightweightness of the main character (very …

Scriptwriter and former film critic Paul Schrader's directing debut, a hot-under-the-blue-collar propagandrama about how the System contrives to divide and conquer the workers in the Detroit auto industry. (The manufacturers of Checker cabs, who opened their facilities to the filmmakers, are graciously absolved, in the acknowledgments, of any likeness to …

Minor Martin Scorsese, but in view of recent performance, minor is an improvement. Major Scorsese (Kundun, Casino, The Age of Innocence) is pretentious Scorsese, puffed-up Scorsese, inflated Scorsese. This one, an anti-valentine to New York City in the pre-Giuliani years of the decade, is an unmistakable companion piece to his …

In an inexplicable street-corner shootout between a cop and a probationer, a stray bullet hits a six-year-old child and (in a poetic turn of phrase) it keeps travelling -- up and up through the New York City power structure. A foursome of wordy screenwriters -- Ken Lipper, Paul Schrader, Nicholas …

Boringly cryptic and oblique Death-in-Venice tale about an unmarried English couple preyed upon by an ambiguous white-suited native (actually Christopher Walken with a bad accent, explained or excused by biographical brushwork to do with an upbringing in England and a Canadian wife). Harold Pinter, working at about half-alert on an …

Paul Schrader's telling of the backstory to The Exorcist -- the Nazis, the loss of faith, the postwar archaeological dig in Africa, the first exorcism, the renewed vocation -- had been deemed unreleasable in its finished form, and been replaced by Renny Harlin's retooling of it from scratch, with the …

Paul Schrader puts Hitchcock's bomb-on-bus theory to the test in this diary of a despairing priest. Ethan Hawke stars as the walking time bomb.

A teenage girl from Grand Rapids, Michigan, disappears in the course of a Christian youth junket to Knott's Berry Farm, and her father (George C. Scott, very good on the externals of a God-fearing Midwesterner) tracks her around the porno-prostitution circuit of Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco. Writer-director …

Published in 1966, Hitchcock by Francois Truffaut was the first book to take a title-by-title approach to exploring a director’s career. It also made it cool to like Alfred Hitchcock. A Hollywood master and an internationally acclaimed Parisian newcomer couldn’t have been more diverse, but Hitch, instantly sensing a fellow …

What Martin Scorsese and company (scriptwriter Paul Schrader, quite prominently) appear to be up to at the most basic level is something that storytellers have been getting up to since the birth of the oral tradition: retelling a standard-repertory myth and altering it in the telling. (In this case using …

Paul Schrader runs his cultural vacuum cleaner over the rock-and-roll scene -- not at the Billboard Top 100 level, but at the bottom-rung bar scene in Cleveland and environs: fly-by-night bands with names like the Barbusters, the Hunzz, Yogurt Moon (shades of Spinal Tap! -- one of whose members, Michael …

Paul Schrader once again explores the spiritual dimension of an unlikely prospect: not this time a gigolo or a rock musician or a New York cabbie but a limo-riding drug trafficker who caters to an upscale clientele ("Twice the price, twice the safety"), offers them sympathetic counseling when indicated ("Personally …

Paul Schrader’s 2017 film First Reformed gave us a solitary man who is keeping a journal; who deals with an intense and intimate crisis before learning that the real enemy is larger, more powerful, and less personal; and who just might find salvation via a compassionate woman. Then, 2021’s The …