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[…]
Costume Drama · Drama · Essays · Mystery · Psychology · Thrillers & Action
Like the subtle differences of someone else’s cleaning efforts, our past is inescapable. A seemingly small choice can have myriad consequences, and this is what Kubrick is on about in[…]
Drama · Essays · SF & Fantasy
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,[…]
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[…]
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[…]
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[…]
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[…]
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[…]
Animation · Artificial Intelligence (AI) · Colonialism · Essays · Horror · SF & Fantasy
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
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
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
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
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[…]
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
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
“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
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,[…]
