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.”[…]
Category: Essays
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[…]
“Look Closer”: The Life Behind American Beauty
“Death is the mother of beauty.” – Wallace Stevens “I choose the ugly as well as the beautiful, knowing it will all be beautiful soon enough.” – Marvin Bell *[…]
On Electrocuting an Elephant and Animal Death in Film
The death of the animal allows for an altering of the visual dynamic that is often inaccessible through traditional mechanisms of film, and, through harnessing and disrupting the tenuous balance[…]
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[…]
Actors & Personalities · Drama · Essays
In Magnolia, Tom Cruise Far Outperformed Real-Life Andrew Tate
Cruise’s performance as Mackey offers a unique opportunity to make sense of a Tate, and to see what all really lies right under the surface of this ongoing phenomenon. *[…]
Essays · Movies · Philosophy
Sacred Time, Profane Screen: The Persistence of Mystical Contemplation in Cinema
Before any immediate plot, the viewer is invited to experience time, allowing images to speak before words, establishing a dialogue between the contemplative time on the screen and the subjective[…]
Activist & Political · Class System · Crime · Essays · Franchises & Series · Myth and Archetype · Outsiders · Politics · SF & Fantasy · Societal Trends · Superheroes
Don’t Be Weird: Heroes, Villains, and the Reinforcement of Class Distinctions in Modern Blockbusters
If you want to make a popular blockbuster, it better be about the right kind of person – and the right kind of person isn’t a loser. A decade ago,[…]
Actors & Personalities · Drama · Essays · Romance
Gazing at Gary Cooper: Sex, Power, Gender, and the Body in Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938), Ball of Fire (1941), and Love in the Afternoon (1957)
As with Monroe, his seemingly all-but-transparent method has proven remarkably difficult to emulate, much less duplicate. (Toles, 2003: 34) Whatever happened to Gary Cooper? The strong, silent type? That was[…]
Essays · Exploitation & Erotica · LGBT & Queer
Glen or Glenda: Psychiatry, Sexuality, and the Silver Screen
Normalizing “deviant” genders and bodies is just one of many tropes in Wood’s complex camp classic.
African · African American · Drama · Essays · Exile and Displacement · Family · Historical & Epic · Race · SF & Fantasy
Black Face Cinema: Historical Grief and the Angry Black (Wo)Man
A think piece discussing the movies Antebellum, Black Panther, Django Unchained, Get Out, and Us. It compares their reception and portrayal of anti-black racism and black suffering, via the lens[…]
Animation · Essays · Fairy Tale · Franchises & Series · SF & Fantasy
To Infinity, and Beyond! Radical Self-Reorientation in the Toy Story Series
Looking back to the original Toy Story series, it seems obvious that one of the things that really helps Buzz accept his child’s toy nature is that he is good[…]
Directors · Essays · Genres · Horror
Sexual Violence and Female Experience in Roman Polanski’s Apartment Trilogy: Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, The Tenant
Roman Polanski was born August 18, 1933, making him 89 years old on this day in 2023. We mark the occasion – we won’t say celebrate – by republishing Elise[…]
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