With space limited inside the car of cinephiles interviewing director Jake Hannaford (John Huston), Joseph McBride handled the clapper board on the first day of shooting The Other Side of[…]
-
Directors · Film Crews · Hollywood · Production · Satire
A “Revolutionary” Narrative Style: Orson Welles’s The Other Side of the Wind
-
Nobody in Babylon: The Hour of the Star (1985) and the Violence of Being Ordinary
The brutality is not simply that a hopeful woman dies before her dreams come true. Amaral brings narrative significance and annihilation almost into contact. For a few moments the world[…]
-
Book Review: A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of the Movies
A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of the Movies, by David Thomson. Simon & Schuster, 2026, 368 pages, $30.00. * * * For as long as film has[…]
-
Drama · Dreams · Mystery · Sex & Relationships
Personal and Profound: On Kubrick’s Late Masterpiece Eyes Wide Shut
Eyes Wide Shut was, without doubt, Kubrick’s most personal picture; it was also, in the director’s estimate, his greatest. It is hard to argue with that assessment, although four or[…]
Most Recent
Actors & Personalities · Celebrity Culture · Hollywood
The Masks She Wore: Identity Strain and Corporate Exploitation in the Life of Marilyn Monroe
Today, global figures regularly leverage their personal struggles with anxiety, depression, and burnout as primary text on social media, transforming clinical transparency into a celebrated marker of authenticity. Yet, while[…]
More
Dystopia · SF & Fantasy · TV series
The Price of Expansion: How Gilead’s Corporate Totalitarianism in The Handmaid’s Tale Lost Its Vigilance in The Testaments
The first-generation system relied on total, complicit violence, where everyone had to stain their hands with blood to become an accomplice to the state’s crime. In The Testaments, we see[…]
Meaninglessness and Horror: A Review of Weapons
The way the bewitched children – and Marcus – run, with their arms outstretched like birds toward an unknown point, creates a recurring pattern. We are conditioned by mysticism to[…]
Class System · Comedy · Drama · French Cinema
The Call to Class: On Renoir’s Rules of the Game
The Rules of the Game, from 1939, is rare entertainment. It is both charming and earnest, light-footed and reflective. Life is always yielding to ideas of life, and vice versa.[…]
Comedy · Directors · Drama · Franchises & Series · LGBT & Queer · Teen films · Youth
The Jock, the Nerd, the Dork, and the Popular Kid: Shura’s “What’s It Gonna Be,” John Hughes, and Queer Nostalgia
To the extent that Shura has “queered” Hughes’s films in the act of paying homage to them, we might wonder how this process is informed by contemporary readings of Hughes,[…]
Semiotic Transubstantiation: A Comparative Semiotics of Literary and Cinematic Sign Systems
The comparative analysis developed throughout this article points toward a broader theoretical conclusion: literary and cinematic signs do not exist in isolation but inhabit a shared semiotic ecology – a[…]
Celebrity Culture · Hollywood · Scandal · Women in Film
Juliann Graham (1915–1935): Ballad of a Small-Town Girl in Hollywood
The story of Juliann Graham is more than one of those cautionary tales found in the newspapers of the day; it is actually a primer, a how-to, on understanding the[…]
Activist & Political · African American · Documentaries · Historical & Epic · Military and Paramilitary · Politics · Producers & Studios · Race · UFOs
Films of Conscience: Raindog and Colin Firth’s Quiet Ambition
Firth’s self-effacement is generally described as a character trait. It is at least as plausible that it is a market condition, however. The films are fundable perhaps because their patron[…]
Make It Grief: Hamnet, Train Dreams, and the Prestige of Loss
Placed side by side, these films illuminate two competing models of prestige naturalism. One builds solemnity through cultural capital, symbol-heavy nature, and affective devices that arrive pre-loaded with meaning. In[…]
Godzilla and Kong: The Hollow World and the Spirit of Capitalism
And so we arrive at the hollow world. Not merely the subterranean kingdom of Kong and Godzilla but the cultural landscape of global capitalism itself: a world filled with endless[…]
The Immovable Man: The Big Lebowski and the Philosophy of Not Changing
The Coen Brothers have made a film about a man who cannot be made to become the story that other characters, and the genre itself, keep trying to impose on[…]
Historical & Epic · Myth and Archetype · SF & Fantasy · War
Polytropos: The Return of Mētis in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey
The two fundamental concepts of Homer’s world – xenia, the generous hospitality owed to strangers as Zeus’s law; and nostos, the longing for home – converge with mētis in Nolan’s[…]
Body Horror · Christianity · Drama · Religion & Spirituality · Theory
Inscribed on the Flesh: Belief, Horror and the Body in Saint Maud and The Exorcist
In Saint Maud, belief is internalised: the body becomes the site of self-monitoring, discipline, and ecstatic surrender, so that authority no longer needs to come from outside because it has[…]
Animation · Anime · Artificial Intelligence (AI) · Cyberpunk
Neon Under Shadows: Japanese Cyberpunk Cinema’s Politics of Technological Alienation
Japanese cyberpunk’s distinctiveness becomes clear when compared to Western cyberpunk. Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) asks: What is human? It’s a philosophical question rooted in Cartesian dualism and humanist tradition.[…]
The Beauty of Failure: Pepê Lima and the History of Marginal Bodies in Michiko to Hatchin (2008–2009)
“Pepê has presence without a corridor.” * * * When I returned to Michiko to Hatchin for a second viewing, I was preparing a research piece on the series as[…]
Desire as a Postcard: Michael Mann’s Cinema and the Postmodern Male Subject
In a world in which the space of the city, once peremptorily defined by its lights and shadows, has been transformed into a reflection of itself devoid of identity, an[…]
Drama · Gore · Horror · Indies
Pleasant Valley as Funhouse Mirror: Regional Othering, Racial Displacement, and the Politics of the Hillbilly Icon in Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Two Thousand Maniacs!
By erasing Black presence entirely, displacing the historical reality of racial violence onto white-on-white revenge, and reviving the hillbilly icon in its most unabashedly vicious form, Lewis’s film enables audiences[…]
Class System · Essays · Historical & Epic · Immigrant Experience
The House Was Never Ours: Cavalcade, Winfield Sheehan, and the Immigrant Grammar of Indirect Grief
The house was never ours. It was the Marryots’ house, and the Bridges served it. It was England’s house, and the Irish lived in it under conditions that were[…]
The Constraints of Gender: On Ex Machina (2015)
There’s a different, far more potent layer to this film; one actually relevant to most, if not all, people watching. It hinges on a question Caleb asks Ava’s creator after[…]
Links + BSA
