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[…]
Category: Writers & Critics
Counterculture · Profiles · Writers & Critics
Carole Eastman: Rediscovering a Hollywood Maverick
Judging from the total lack of information on screenwriter Adrien Joyce (Carole Eastman), Academy Award nominee for her original story and screenplay of Five Easy Pieces, I could have concluded[…]
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Activist & Political · Counterculture · Crime · Drama · Urban Conflict · Writers & Critics
One Battle After Another: On the Movie, the Critics, and the Moment
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[…]
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[…]
Drama · French Cinema · Uncategorized · Writers & Critics
Bresson, Schrader, and the Fool: Transcendental and Materialist Interpretations in the Films of Robert Bresson
I think the reason Bresson’s films resist singular interpretations is that they are composed of multiple, overlapping perspectives. His films contain elements of humanism, nihilism, absurdism, existentialism, transcendentalism, and numerous[…]
Books · Directors · Women in Film · Writers & Critics
Book Review: Carrie Courogen, Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius
Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius. St. Martin’s Press, 2024, 400pp., $30.00. * * * Published on the heels of Mark Harris’s[…]
Absurdism · Cityscapes · Drama · Literature and Film · Writers & Critics
Cosmopolis: A DeLillo–Cronenberg Mutation
Cosmopolis reflects the experience of a cancer patient, housed within a corporatized institution, dependent on the biases and whims of authorities, machines, and data. The book and film, poorly reviewed[…]
The Pearls of Pauline (Kael, That Is)
The little film critic who could sort of
Absurdism · Activist & Political · Counterculture · Crime · Experimental & Underground · Fairy Tale · Politics · Writers & Critics
Alice’s Evolution: Chicago 70 and the Revolutionary Awakening of Lewis Carroll’s Victorian Heroine
Abstract Interposing characters, dialogue, and symbols from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland into a contemporary political scenario – the Chicago 7 trial – Kerry Feltham’s experimental film Chicago 70 provides[…]
Directors · Drama · Family · Writers & Critics
Sweat the Technique: Spielberg’s Cinematic Künstlerroman, The Fabelmans, and Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Right before the unnerving camping incident, Sammy has been told by his uncle Boris, who once tamed lions used in movies, that art is a dangerous undertaking and that it[…]
Books · Directors · Writers & Critics
Pulp Nonfiction: Quentin Tarantino’s Cinema Speculation
It would be easy – and fun – to focus entirely on the good and to co-sign his [Tarantino’s] praise for films that are also favorites of mine such as[…]
Biopic · Directors · Experimental & Underground · War · Writers & Critics
Memory, Trauma, and Visualising Poetry in Terence Davies’s Benediction
I’m not interested in what happened next; I’m interested in what happens emotionally next. It’s like memory. Memory isn’t linear. It’s cyclical. A tiny thing can be the thing that’s[…]
Comedy · Communism and Socialism · Directors · Drama · Eastern European · Russia · War · Writers & Critics
Hungarian Plays into American Movies: Billy Wilder’s Five Graves to Cairo and One, Two, Three
Billy Wilder turned to these two plays because they offered the situations, structure, and characters that would allow his imagination to flower and create contemporary stories – a patriotic military[…]
Directors · Drama · Essays · Writers & Critics
He’s Thinking of Ending Things: Charlie Kaufman’s Breakup Letter to an Entire Age
Where Reid spends pages and pages absentmindedly ruminating on the many very painful, and very human, distinctions between Self and Other before losing himself in a tonal mess of relationship[…]
Drama · Religion & Spirituality · Writers & Critics
Two Perspectives on Sainthood in 1951: Roberto Rossellini’s Europe ’51 and Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair
Graham Greene could be a very political writer (nowhere more than in The Quiet American, which was his next major work after The End of the Affair), but Christianity has[…]
Drama · Women in Film · Writers & Critics
Novel into Film: Adapting Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter
We come to find out as viewers, whether we believe in Leda’s self-governing comportment at the beginning or not, that this task of motherhood is never-ending; each work demonstrates to[…]
Comedy · Directors · Eastern European · Romance · Writers & Critics
How Did Hungarians Do It? The Hungarian World of Ernst Lubitsch
Lubitsch biographers and critics have accepted the lore that the Hungarian plays he used for his films were inferior. That widely held perception has come about because Lubitsch’s admirers want[…]
Drama · War · Writers & Critics
Designated Mourner: On Christian Petzold’s Transit
The refugees’ babel is a constant background presence in Seghers’s novel, a kind of Greek chorus commenting on the various ship arrivals and departures, and spreading news of any developments[…]
Directors · Drama · Outsiders · War · Writers & Critics
“Write Some Good Ones”: How Billy Wilder’s Most Autobiographical Film Was Directed by Somebody Else
Rumanian refugee Georges Iscovescu (Charles Boyer) conning a guileless California schoolteacher, Emmy Brown (Olivia de Havilland, in an Oscar-nominated role), into marrying him so he can enter the United States[…]
Directors · Essays · Romance · Writers & Critics
Vertigo and Lolita: The Supreme Love Fictions of the 20th Century?
But these reflections bring Vertigo down to “depressing” reality. The view that reality is a downer redeemable only by “exalted seeing” is the basis for James Harvey’s disparagement of 1950s[…]
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