His finest films—Cruising (1980), The French Connection (1971), The Exorcist (1973), To Live and Die in L.A.—are lotuses in the mung, gloriously efflorescent spores on the fertilizer of innumerable Z-grade genre formulas: the good bad cop, the haunted teenager, the thin line between law and fate.

By Scott Foundas Early in One Night Stand (a.k.a. Alibis), the 1977 feature directing debut of Pierre Rissient, the following dedication appears onscreen: “To Harry d’Abbadie d’Arrast, Movie Business Casualty.” A name now all but erased from the cinematic fossil record, d’Arrast was the Argentine-born, French-Basque filmmaker who came to Hollywood at the end of…

By Michael Sicinski In his 1995 interview with Scott MacDonald published in A Critical Cinema 3, Peter Hutton made a general assessment about his films, one that has been quoted quite a bit in the weeks since the filmmaker’s death. Let’s take a moment and consider it: “I’ve never felt that my films are very…