David L. Pike teaches literature and film at American University. His most recent book is Cold War Culture in the 1960s and 1980s: The Bunkered Decades, out November 2021 from Oxford UP. Earlier books include Canadian Cinema since the 1980s: At the Heart of the World (Toronto UP); Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800-2001; Subterranean Cities: The World beneath Paris and London, 1800-1945; and Passage through Hell: Modernist Descents, Medieval Underworlds, all from Cornell University Press. He is co-author of Literature: A World of Writing and co-editor of the Longman Anthology of World Literature, and has published widely on 19th- and 20th-century urban literature, culture, and film. His most recent books are Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City, co-authored with Malini Ranganathan and Sapana Doshi, and After the End: Cold War Culture and Apocalyptic Imaginations in the Twenty-First Century. 
Crime · Drama · Historical & Epic · Indigenous · Native Americans
Killers interweaves the Western, film noir, the gangster film, the police procedural, the courtroom drama, and even a bit of horror; however, it jumps between them with often elliptical editing[…]
African American · Drama · Dreams · Horror · Urban Conflict
Good mornin’, Mr. Benson, I see you’re doin’ well. If I had me a shotgun I’d blow you straight to hell. – Robert Hunter/Jerry Garcia, “Candyman,” 1970 * * *[…]
Essays · Pandemic · SF & Fantasy · War
Excerpted from the author’s new critical study, Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s: The Bunkered Decades (Oxford University Press, December 2021), with the kind permission of[…]
African · Colonialism · Education · Literature and Film · Women in Film
Much of the affective force of Palcy’s film closely resembles and draws on the deep emotional involvement Truffaut leads his audience to invest in the vulnerable, yearning ne’er-do-well Antoine Doinel.[…]
Activist & Political · Brazilian Cinema · Indigenous · SF & Fantasy · Westerns
When I watched Bacurau again this summer online, so much felt different: the open-air communal life of the villagers seemed even more distant and utopian; after months of Brazil’s president[…]
One of the ways in which Parasite differs from many more naturalistic movies about urban poverty is that access to mediated experience is shown to be a function of opportunity[…]
In the same way that the heptapod language permits Louise to grasp the warp and weft of her world, the form of the heptapods taps into the once fringe and now venerable[…]
“Part of it is about the right to privacy, and part of it is about telling the story the way she wanted it to be told. But there’s also an underlying argument regarding the existential fact of being an actor, and the related argument of identity being performed rather than essential.”
“It is a much starker contrast than, say, in Hitchcock’s London films of the same period, where the humorous grace notes of the urban everyday and a happy ending are balanced throughout by a recognition of the inherent instability and all-out terror of the same modernity that produces those grace notes.”
“Cronenberg’s method, it seems, is perfectly suited for making truly historical dramas, stripping away our tendency to read individuals through their writings in something like the way diseases in his films strip his characters down to their essences.”
“There are truths that can only be revealed on condition of having been discovered.”– Wajdi Mouawad, Incendies (2003)
“It is a protean film, and changes radically depending on how you approach it.”
Horror · Reviews · SF & Fantasy
“Hillcoat and his crew have taken the book’s hints and modeled their scavenging pair on contemporary images of homeless people, who already, as Hillcoat aptly puts it, are ‘living that apocalyptic world of day-to-day survival on the streets with no money and no food.'”
“In classic Egoyan style, the humor is always also terrifying. . .”
Actors & Personalities · Essays · SF & Fantasy
“Neville remains wholly oblivious, falling into each trap the ferals set … “
Indigenous film, global dreams1 For most of the film critics who have given it any thought, the term “Canadian Popular Cinema” is a vexing oxymoron. In a paradox that goes[…]
Scattered pleasures and frequent irritations As someone who has followed Atom Egoyan’s career closely since his pre-Exotica days, viewing his most recent feature films has been an intensely ambivalent experience.[…]
