Drama · Essays · SF & Fantasy
A Film for No One (Except Me): On The Adam Project
Perhaps this is a fantasy. Perhaps this is the father as imagined, not as experienced. Perhaps this is what the students receive, and what the son never did. And so,[…]
Category: Essays
The Unseen Line: Cinema as Geometry
When everything is shown, little is felt. * * * Cinema has always been described through movement – of images, of time, of bodies across space. Yet what if its[…]
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Activist & Political · Essays · Franchises & Series · Politics · Superheroes
Predicting the Rise of Trump: Captain America: Civil War (2016)
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
Batman Reserves: Burton’s Sequel as Anti-Fed Allegory
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[…]
Comedy · Comics · Essays · Hollywood · Men & Masculinity · Philosophy · Silents
Three’s a Crowd: Harry Langdon and the Poetics of Fragility
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[…]
Crime · Essays · Thrillers & Action
Trigger Warning, or: How Jessica Alba Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Woke Imperialism
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
The (Re)Turn: Vicious Retooling of Teenager Archetypes in the Twin Peaks Revival
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[…]
Drama · Essays · Men & Masculinity · Nature
Notes on Jaws Then and Now
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[…]
Animation · Artificial Intelligence (AI) · Colonialism · Essays · Horror · SF & Fantasy
Becoming Alien – Establishing Posthuman Bioethics in The Martian and Scavengers Reign
Ultimately, the comparison of human–ecology relationships in both The Martian and Scavengers Reign reveals two contrasting modes of becoming alien: The former envisions human survival as contingent on an anthropocentric[…]
Class System · Crime · Essays · Race
“Who Gets a Trial, Who Gets Killed”: Race, Class, and Legal Morality in the Film Versions of To Kill a Mockingbird and A Time to Kill
The ethical contrast between due process and vigilantism is not the deepest fault line between these movies. A sharper divide concerns who counts as fully human within the moral universe[…]
Body Horror · Eco-horror · Essays · Horror · Myth and Archetype · Splatter & Gore
The Lingua Franca of Fear: A Dialectical History of Global Horror Cinema
This article argues that the history of global horror is not a linear progression of influence from a dominant West to the passive rest of the world but a dynamic,[…]
African American · Asian · Drama · Essays
On the Dignity of the Successful Man: Akira Kurosawa, Spike Lee, and the “High-Low” Scale
Both films will give the critic searching for a standard class-focused reading a headache. We have to admit that the kidnapper exerts an imposition on the success of “the other.”[…]
Drama · Essays · Feminism · French Cinema · Men & Masculinity · Sex & Relationships · Women in Film
Tango Redux: Complicity
Last Tango in Paris is a case study in how a culture processes shame – who bears it, who survives it, who escapes it entirely. Maria Schneider, long ignored, is[…]
A Poetics of Grief: Relation Through the Lens of Relationship in Celine Song’s Past Lives
In the screenplay for Past Lives, Song’s scene descriptions are acutely sensitive to the way in which identity lives in the distance between self and Other, between knowing and mystery.[…]
DVD & Blu-ray · Essays · Societal Trends
The Criterion Complex: Prestige, Preservation, and the Politics of Taste
When you turn a political object into a collectible, you’re no longer confronting it – you’re displaying it. You’re posing with the thing that once asked you to change. *[…]
Essays · LGBT & Queer · Politics · Romance · Russia
Collective Subjects and Soviet Subjectivities: The Counterplan, A Severe Young Man, and the Paradoxes of Socialist Realism
“The history of ideas is the history of the spite of certain solitaries.” – E. M. Cioran, All Gall Is Divided * * * It was at the 1934 First[…]
Drama · Essays · Film Crews · Hollywood · News · Production · Production History · Stuntwork
The Silver Screen Is Rusting: Why Rust Can’t Happen Again
Even if Rust is defined as professional by its crew, the danger that allows a crew member to die cannot coexist with the description of professional. If that is professional,[…]
The Body Embarrassed: “Cringing” as Empathetic Response to American Beauty and The Talented Mr. Ripley
As American Beauty deals with visualized and thematic pleasure by giving us “beauty” in both sexualized and desexualized forms, and Ripley makes us feel like a voyeur alongside its protagonist[…]
Oscar Nom Bomb: 2025 Drops a New Deus ex Machina in the Oscar Machine
A plot device where an unexpected event resolves a seemingly unsolvable problem is called a “deus ex machina” which translates to “god from the machine” in Latin; it often refers[…]
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