The Great Galactic Chess Hustle: Kubrick, Bricolage, and Collective Memory
Of all the visual art forms, film is the most improvisational, requiring the most thorough collection of spare pieces. In order for a film to work its magic, it must[…]
Category: Directors
Directors · Film Crews · Hollywood · Production · Satire
A “Revolutionary” Narrative Style: Orson Welles’s The Other Side of the Wind
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[…]
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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,[…]
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[…]
The Haptic Screen: A Phenomenology of Modern Auteurism from Christopher Nolan to Charlotte Wells
This essay attempts to map a “haptic geography” of contemporary cinema, exploring how directors like Christopher Nolan, Bong Joon-ho, Denis Villeneuve, Paul Thomas Anderson, Céline Sciamma, Charlotte Wells, and Yorgos[…]
Directors · Satire · Scandinavian Cinema
You’ll All be Crying by the End, Ha! The Question of Sincerity in Breaking the Waves
Our prevailing moviemaking ethos calls for emotion to be tempered through a kind of ebb and flow structure, for an emotion to be slowly built toward and quickly moved away[…]
Counterculture · Directors · Exploitation & Erotica · Fairy Tale · Indies · Sex & Relationships
Sacred Without Symbol: Walerian Borowczyk and the Canon’s Fear of the Erotic
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”[…]
Activist & Political · Class System · Directors · Italian Cinema
Closing with the Past: Marco Bellocchio’s Cinema and the Movement of History
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[…]
Counterculture · Crime · Cult Cinema · Directors · Drama · Satire
The Kubrick Production: How Stanley Kubrick Stage-Managed Reality
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.[…]
Directors · Film Culture · Film History · Film Studies · Memoir · Writers & Critics
A Cinephile’s Paradise: The Quirky Education of a Film Scholar – Joseph McBride, in conversation with Danny Peary
Joseph McBride, filmed in 1970, is taking notes on his wrist, a habit he picked up while reviewing films, in his role as the critic and historian Mister Pister in[…]
Activist & Political · Directors · Italian Cinema · LGBT & Queer
From Gospel to Grotesque: The Cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini
Pasolini is in the canon – but only as a statue, not a voice. His name appears in film textbooks, his films screen at retrospectives, and Salò gets trotted out[…]
Directors · Drama · French Cinema · Nouvelle Vague
Games of Logic and Longing: The Quiet Radicalism of Éric Rohmer
In an age of clickbait politics and algorithmic attention spans, there’s something quietly revolutionary about refusing to manufacture drama. Rohmer’s refusal to manipulate emotion – to cue violins or insert[…]
Comedy · Directors · Indies · Interviews · Thrillers & Action
Joel Potrykus talks Vulcanizadora, Being “Really Immature,” and What He Thinks Hell Is Like
I love it when someone just absolutely shoves the vision down your throat. * * * Vulcanizadora, Joel Potrykus’ fifth feature film, hit the festival circuit last spring with a[…]
Directors · Drama · Religion & Spirituality
The Secret of Creativity: The Inspirations of Paul Schrader’s First Reformed
“That’s the secret of creativity. You have to steal around. If you keep going back to that same 7-Eleven, they’re going to catch you. So you go over to the[…]
Directors · Essays · Experimental & Underground · French Cinema
Forever Alex: Leos Carax’s It’s Not Me (C’est pas moi, 2024)
Carax suggests that the constant availability of images as immaterial streams – reduced to binary code and accessible through handheld devices – has diminished their impact. One of the film’s[…]
Two Ends Without a Middle: On David Lynch’s Kitsch
David Lynch died on January 15, 2025 at age 78. We celebrate this important auteur with the following analysis of some of the less remarked Lynchian themes and his work[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors · Drama
A Fresh Face in the Crowd: Judy Holliday in George Cukor’s The Marrying Kind
“A true artist” Cukor called Judy Holliday. “She could interpret a text with the subtlest detail.” Their creative relationship brought out the qualities that made her a new kind of[…]
Directors · Experimental & Underground · Film Technology & History · Interviews
Shapes Through Time and Space: An Interview with Ken Jacobs About His Abstract 3D Film 3X3D
3D is used to record visual reality, but that’s where I take off to the unimaginable. We are (wonderfully) constrained by our particular physiognomy and I wouldn’t change a thing,[…]
Directors · Drama · DVD & Blu-ray · Westerns
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid: Revisiting Sam Peckinpah’s Unrealized Western on Criterion
Action scenes are what a summer audience wants, but in Pat Garrett the shootouts become episodic and lack the ratcheting up of tension, followed by its release at the climactic[…]
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