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[…]
Category: Genres
Comedy · Drama · Family · French Cinema
Family Matters: Shared Space in the Films of Cédric Klapisch
As a film within the evolving Klapisch oeuvre, what La Venue de l’Avenir (2025) looks forward toward remains, of course, to be seen. As a capstone at this point in[…]
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Hollywood · Music & Musicals · Pre-Code
“If this doesn’t get ’em, nothing will”: Busby Berkeley and Footlight Parade
An essay excerpted from the new edition of Persistence of Vision: A Collection of Film Criticism, edited by Joseph McBride, 2026. Originally published in 1968 by the Wisconsin Film Society[…]
Comedy · Military and Paramilitary · Nazism · Satire · War
The Great Dictator: Stink, Sacrifice, and Private Power in Hynkel’s Speech
Chaplin is not merely parodying how a dictator sounds. He is anatomizing how fascism recruits, extracts, degrades, appropriates, scapegoats, and lies. * * * Charlie Chaplin’s opening Hynkel speech in[…]
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”[…]
Class System · Crime · Drama · French Cinema
Exchange and Virulent Sacrality in Robert Bresson’s L’Argent
What remains is a fierce critique leveled against money: the “father-master,” the heart of every exchange in free-market society, and the origin of the degradation of being first into having[…]
Drama · Politics · Thrillers & Action · War
Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite (2025): The System Works. Where Is the Human?
The war didn’t end. It was put on hold. The system never slept – men like Gonzalez kept watch, women like Walker stared at screens, bureaucrats like that man filled[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Screwball Comedy
Jane Palmer’s Gentle Anarchy: Lady in a Jam (1942) and the Lost Liberty of Screwball Comedy
In a contemporary landscape populated by often-faltering comedies – films that try desperately to be clever only to end up feeling heavy – this 1942 picture recalls an elementary truth:[…]
Capitalism · Class System · Comedy · Drama
The Deconstruction of Middle-Class Identity in Planes, Trains and Automobiles
Released at a time when conservative hegemony was coming to an end, Planes, Trains and Automobiles can be contextualised as an example of a cinematic expression of an ideological conjuncture,[…]
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[…]
Brazilian Cinema · Horror · Labor
The Work That Never Leaves: Labor as a Parasitic Presence in Hard Work
The horror in Hard Work is not that a monster exists; it is that the monster is structural. It resides in architecture, in managerial relations, in aspirational rhetoric, in the[…]
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[…]
Mystery · Sex & Relationships · Thrillers & Action
The Invisible Thread: Or How Fragment of Fear Anticipates Eyes Wide Shut – And Why Kubrick Almost Certainly Saw It
In both films, the protagonist’s disorientation becomes a tool for the audience: we are not merely watching two men hunted by secret forces but two men whose consciousnesses have become[…]
Franchises & Series · LGBT & Queer · SF & Fantasy · Superheroes
“Was That Over the Top?” – Queerness and Madness in Batman Forever (1995)
Queerness and madness can be seen as dangers to the status quo, disruptive states that open up new possibilities. The question then is do you find this disruptiveness beguiling or[…]
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.[…]
Peckinpah’s Groundless Ground of Ethics in The Wild Bunch
Peckinpah suggests that humans maintain micro‑moralities, politeness, fairness, reciprocity even when they have abandoned macro‑moralities such as justice or compassion. People prefer manageable moral problems, politeness, fairness, loyalty, over unmanageable[…]
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[…]
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[…]
Christianity · Religion & Spirituality · Scandinavian Cinema
Christian Culture in Scandinavian Cinema: On Dreyer, Bergman, and Dogme 95
From the austere formalism of Carl Theodor Dreyer, which transforms cinematic language into a vessel for transcendent faith, to the existential torment of Ingmar Bergman’s “silence of God,” the iconoclastic[…]
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