Never allow anyone the luxury of assuming that because the dead and deadening scenery of the American city-of-dreadful-night is so utterly devoid of mystery, so thoroughly flat-footed, sterile and infantile, so burdened with the illusory gloss of "baseball-hot dogs-apple-pie-and-Chevrolet" that it is somehow outside the psycho-sexual domain. The eternal pagan psychodrama is escalated under these "modern" conditions precisely because sorcery is not what 20th century man can accept as real. - James Shelby Downard

The aeon-old practice of imbuing stories,…

Most of Stanley Kubrick's movies are about these five themes:
1) individuals attempting to strive against a deterministic Universe or the stifling social Establishment that seeks to put everything under its control
2) the Establishment brainwashing people to conform to its colonialist desires
3) the process of evolution or devolution of the protagonist and/or humanity in general
4) humans struggling to overcome their base animalistic selves
5) the paradoxical interplay between Eros and Thanatos

Theme 1) is noticeable immediately in…

Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Eclisse (aka The Eclipse) is one of the most enchanting movies I know of. It is neither a simple romantic film nor a dry treatise about loneliness and alienation. It's more of a gut-wrenching apocalypse movie than anything else.

Story-wise, the closest film to L'Eclisse would be, I kid you not, John Carpenter's They Live (1986). In both films, the world is seamlessly overtaken by a mysterious alien force and only the protagonist can see through the deception.…