The Rules of the Game, from 1939, is rare entertainment. It is both charming and earnest, light-footed and reflective. Life is always yielding to ideas of life, and vice versa.[…]
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Comedy · Directors · Drama · Franchises & Series · LGBT & Queer · Teen films · Youth
The Jock, the Nerd, the Dork, and the Popular Kid: Shura’s “What’s It Gonna Be,” John Hughes, and Queer Nostalgia
To the extent that Shura has “queered” Hughes’s films in the act of paying homage to them, we might wonder how this process is informed by contemporary readings of Hughes,[…]
The Immovable Man: The Big Lebowski and the Philosophy of Not Changing
The Coen Brothers have made a film about a man who cannot be made to become the story that other characters, and the genre itself, keep trying to impose on[…]
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[…]
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[…]
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,[…]
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[…]
Comedy · Directors · Indies · Interviews · Thrillers & Action
Joel Potrykus talks Vulcanizadora, Being “Really Immature,” and What He Thinks Hell Is Like
I love it when someone just absolutely shoves the vision down your throat. * * * Vulcanizadora, Joel Potrykus’ fifth feature film, hit the festival circuit last spring with a[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors · Drama
A Fresh Face in the Crowd: Judy Holliday in George Cukor’s The Marrying Kind
“A true artist” Cukor called Judy Holliday. “She could interpret a text with the subtlest detail.” Their creative relationship brought out the qualities that made her a new kind of[…]
Book Review: SHEMP! The Biography of the Three Stooges’ Shemp Howard, the Face of Film Comedy
SHEMP! The Biography of the Three Stooges’ Shemp Howard, the Face of Film Comedy, by Burt Kearns. Applause Books, 2024, 280pp. $32.95 On March 11, 1895, a masterclass in American[…]
Celebrity Culture · Comedy · Hollywood · Road Movies
Turn Back? The Road to Ishtar
Road to Morocco made the National Film Registry by going to the Mojave Desert in California and using rear screen projection. It didn’t need to go to a “real” casbah.[…]
Comedy · Drama · Interviews · Picaresque · Producers & Studios
The Sweet East’s Online Odyssey: In Conversation with Palme d’Or-Winning Producer Alex Coco
A conversation with Palme d’Or-winning producer Alex Coco * * * In Sean Price William’s The Sweet East, we are told “Everything Will Happen,” which may be a warning to[…]
Activist & Political · Comedy · Drama
Reactionary Politics: On Sean Price Williams’s The Sweet East (2023)
It’s easy to mistake The Sweet East for a progressive indictment of modern America, with its gun-wielding conspiracy theorists and predatory authority figures – but they belie a blasé politics[…]
“Nothing Inside”: On Pablo Larraín’s El Conde (2023)
This man who watches you returns from hell […]; he is hollow, he is full of air. Dry hands hold him upright from behind, like a house of cards being[…]
Comedy · LGBT & Queer · Sex & Relationships · Uncategorized
Meta-Morphoses: Sebastián Silva’s Rotting in the Sun (2023)
As seen with Jordan and Mateo, Silva extends his self-fictionalization to most of the cast, taking actors and regurgitating them as screen versions of themselves. Sometimes the cinematic portraits come[…]
The (Asian) American Dream: Neoliberal Feminism, Orientalism, and Ambivalence in Crazy Rich Asians
Crazy Rich Asians’ re-orientalization of Asians reinforces Eurocentrism and the Western gaze. Feminist and Orientalist readings of this film ultimately divulge the ability of Asians in the West to subconsciously[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Comics · Eastern European · Hollywood
Reluctantly “Cuddles”: On S. Z. Sakall
S. Z. Sakall’s ultra-rare 1954 memoir, The Story of Cuddles, attests that there was more to the comic actor than adorable fretfulness and jiggly jowls * * * He was[…]
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