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Comedy · Drama · Family · French Cinema
As a film within the evolving Klapisch oeuvre, what La Venue de l’Avenir (2025) looks forward toward remains, of course, to be seen. As a capstone at this point in[…]
Hollywood · Music & Musicals · Pre-Code
An essay excerpted from the new edition of Persistence of Vision: A Collection of Film Criticism, edited by Joseph McBride, 2026. Originally published in 1968 by the Wisconsin Film Society[…]
Comedy · Military and Paramilitary · Nazism · Satire · War
Chaplin is not merely parodying how a dictator sounds. He is anatomizing how fascism recruits, extracts, degrades, appropriates, scapegoats, and lies. * * * Charlie Chaplin’s opening Hynkel speech in[…]
Counterculture · Directors · Exploitation & Erotica · Fairy Tale · Indies · Sex & Relationships
Even in the age of reevaluation, Borowczyk remains a problem critics would rather sidestep than solve. His films don’t fit the revival mold. They can’t be easily slotted into “elevated”[…]
Class System · Crime · Drama · French Cinema
What remains is a fierce critique leveled against money: the “father-master,” the heart of every exchange in free-market society, and the origin of the degradation of being first into having[…]
Drama · Politics · Thrillers & Action · War
The war didn’t end. It was put on hold. The system never slept – men like Gonzalez kept watch, women like Walker stared at screens, bureaucrats like that man filled[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Screwball Comedy
In a contemporary landscape populated by often-faltering comedies – films that try desperately to be clever only to end up feeling heavy – this 1942 picture recalls an elementary truth:[…]
Capitalism · Class System · Comedy · Drama
Released at a time when conservative hegemony was coming to an end, Planes, Trains and Automobiles can be contextualised as an example of a cinematic expression of an ideological conjuncture,[…]
Activist & Political · Essays · Franchises & Series · Politics · Superheroes
I only dimly perceived that one day Trump would threaten without provocation war against Denmark, so we could conquer Greenland, and who would willingly abet genocide in Gaza. I could[…]
Conspiracies · Essays · Superheroes
The opening shot of Bruce Wayne arriving at Max Schreck’s elite ball in Batman Returns, featuring a guest in a menorah headpiece. The shot is framed so Bruce collides head-on[…]
Brazilian Cinema · Horror · Labor
The horror in Hard Work is not that a monster exists; it is that the monster is structural. It resides in architecture, in managerial relations, in aspirational rhetoric, in the[…]
Activist & Political · Class System · Directors · Italian Cinema
Even after the radical shift in register with his collaboration with Massimo Fagioli, everything still holds up: the essence of historical struggle remains the true core of Bellocchio’s cinema, whether[…]
Mystery · Sex & Relationships · Thrillers & Action
In both films, the protagonist’s disorientation becomes a tool for the audience: we are not merely watching two men hunted by secret forces but two men whose consciousnesses have become[…]
Franchises & Series · LGBT & Queer · SF & Fantasy · Superheroes
Queerness and madness can be seen as dangers to the status quo, disruptive states that open up new possibilities. The question then is do you find this disruptiveness beguiling or[…]
Counterculture · Crime · Cult Cinema · Directors · Drama · Satire
Every aspect of his professional life was stage-managed with the same precision he brought to a tracking shot. The results were remarkable. Total artistic control achieved at a young age.[…]
Peckinpah suggests that humans maintain micro‑moralities, politeness, fairness, reciprocity even when they have abandoned macro‑moralities such as justice or compassion. People prefer manageable moral problems, politeness, fairness, loyalty, over unmanageable[…]
Comedy · Comics · Essays · Hollywood · Men & Masculinity · Philosophy · Silents
He isn’t just a clown; he is a deconstructionist who reveals the hollowness of the Hollywood dream. The “pause” – those agonizing seconds where Langdon stands motionless – is far[…]
Activist & Political · Counterculture · Crime · Drama · Urban Conflict · Writers & Critics
For a popular entertainment, One Battle is ultimately hopeful but not pandering. Viewers do not leave the theater with the spoon-fed feel-good reassurances offered by a Rocky or a Star[…]
Christianity · Religion & Spirituality · Scandinavian Cinema
From the austere formalism of Carl Theodor Dreyer, which transforms cinematic language into a vessel for transcendent faith, to the existential torment of Ingmar Bergman’s “silence of God,” the iconoclastic[…]
Crime · Essays · Thrillers & Action
Commando Parker is the Jeanne D’Arc of a morally bankrupt, corrupt, violent, and racist Empire, and she’s gakked-to-the-gills high on the stupidest and shallowest form of identity politics, giddy with[…]
Drama · Essays · Surrealism
Lynch takes the glamorized version of youth (even some of the glamor from his very own ’90s series) often presented on-screen and renders it unrecognizable. Dramatized teenhood usually tries to[…]
Experimental & Underground · India · Production · Religion & Spirituality
People ask me why we chose a single take. Why not shoot normally and then edit nicely? But when a man is waiting for a sign from God, time itself[…]
Colonialism · Drama · Imperialism · Melodrama
Typically recognized for its portrayal of middle-class repression and female depression, the film is also an early eulogy to British empire. The doomed flirtation signals an end to Britain’s love[…]
Drama · Essays · Men & Masculinity · Nature
The myth of the Great White bears numerous meanings, of variable relevance, from the perspective of then and now. Either way, the old Ahab type is unable to triumph, but[…]
