Tough Nuts to Crack: Fuller’s Shock Corridor (1982)
Sam Fuller occupies a pretty unique place, or rather places, in the Canons of Film Criticism. For the Cro-Magnites, Fuller is the great American primitive, swinging through the trees with…
Round Table: Ronnie Scheib
Introduction In 1980, Ronnie Scheib wrote an explicitly polemical auteurist piece on the films of Ida Lupino [1] . In 1996, Scheib visited Melbourne under the auspices of the Melbourne…
Angst for the Memories: Of Cinematic Fathers and Sons, High Hopes and Bad Debts, but Chiefly Wim Wenders (1990)
In Wim Wenders' The American Friend, actor-director Dennis Hopper kills off filmmaker Sam Fuller (star of Hopper's then seemingly last movie, The Last Movie, about a filmmaker making his last…
Ida Lupino: Auteuress (1980)
In his hagiography of American cinema, the Gospel according to St. Andrew, Sarris consigns Ida Lupino to outer limbo in a single sentence: "Ida Lupino's directed films express much of…
My Friend Ronnie
Ronnie Scheib (1944-2015) was an exceptional film critic. I had met her almost thirty years ago thanks to Janine Euvrard-Halbriecht and Michel Euvrard. She came regularly to Montreal - she…
Tex Arcana: The Cartoons of Tex Avery (1980)
(‘Tex Arcana: The Cartoons of Tex Avery’, first published in Gerald Peary & Danny Peary (eds) The American Animated Cartoon: A Critical Anthology New York: Dutton, 1980. Republished with permission…
Whatever Happened to the Present Tense? Paranoid Ramblings on the Revisionist ‘80s (1997)
It’s not often a film comes along with a title that neatly sums up an entire decade, but Back to the Future seems to have done just that for the…
Subconsciousness Raising: Charles Schnee (1981)
It would not be hard to “rediscover” scriptwriter Charles Schnee. Start out with his undisputed terrain, the Hollywood-on-Hollywood film: The Bad and the Beautiful and Two Weeks in Another Town,…
Ronnie Scheib, Variety Film Critic, Dies at 71
Ronnie Scheib, Variety's longtime New York-based freelance film critic, died Oct. 4 after a three-year battle with lung cancer. She was 71. Scheib began reviewing films for Variety in 2002,…
The City Revisited (2004)
It seems that my compatriots, many of whom are increasingly put off by the elections, are making their way to the cinema as a barometer of their political sentiments, box…
Ronnie Scheib (1944 – 2015)
“Daffy Duck, c’est moi.” [1] In 1996 the film critic Ronnie Scheib was a guest of the Melbourne International Film Festival. Ronnie was invited to introduce, and speak about, the…