Take Your Time: A Step-Chart to the Films of Abel-Gordon-Romy
Each Abel-Gordon-Romy scenario is like a test, or challenge – in heroic terms, a trial – the filmmakers put to themselves, culminating in the couple going it alone for Lost[…]
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Each Abel-Gordon-Romy scenario is like a test, or challenge – in heroic terms, a trial – the filmmakers put to themselves, culminating in the couple going it alone for Lost[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors · Historical & Epic · Politics
Charlie Chaplin was born on April 16, 1889. To honor the old boy, we herewith present Alan Vanneman’s witty discussion of one of Charlie’s masterpieces, originally published in Bright Lights[…]
Comedy · Literature and Film · Theory · Writers & Critics
The oblique reference to Poe by means of the double POE acronyms, then, can be seen as linking the fundamental prophecy of Dr. Strangelove with the much earlier secular prophecies[…]
Absurdism · Comedy · Drama · Eastern European · Horror
The Cremator, only Juraj Herz’s second film, was adapted from a novel by Ladislav Fuks. It was well received, won a few awards, and was promptly banned for two decades[…]
We can further associate the filmmaker, the man with whom we’ve placed our narrative trust, with the “psycho” of both the title and our typical image of one, the latter[…]
Comedy · Film Technology & History · Franchises & Series · Theory
Stereoscopic experience, therefore, drastically alters the positioning of the viewer in relation to diegetic content, creating the illusion that the body of the spectator is immersed within the screen planes[…]
In Joker, we see a reversal of Tarantino’s aesthetic, where a patently comic character, a joker with a clown face, is, by degrees, rendered tragic, or as near tragic as[…]
Comedy · Counterculture · Crime · Historical & Epic · Hollywood · Movies · Westerns
Who are these people? Watching Cliff try to figure it out is painful, because we know the future, but such knowledge is not power. Within its imagined boundaries, Once Upon[…]
Comedy · Costume Drama · Historical & Epic
This gets at the heart of The Favourite, which is one of the most evident trends in anti-sexist filmmaking lately: to be willing to portray women as unadulteratedly evil, as[…]
Comedy · Counterculture · Drama · Sex & Relationships
Concepts of sex and marriage have changed monumentally in the last few decades and still today prove endlessly malleable and undefinable. We spend our whole lives attempting to shape our[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Drama · Essays · Romance
QT’s films are commonly hurtling toward darkness, yet Once Upon feels like a repudiation, as much as a culmination, of his oeuvre. There’s a point in the experience where the[…]
“Lucky Grandma,” says Claire Baiz in her fifth Tribeca dispatch, “features richly layered characters in director Sasie Sealy’s homage to Chinatown that make this universal tale both reassuring and groundbreaking.”[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Pre-Code
“With his impish grin, twinkling eyes, and boyish blond hair, he looks like Tom Sawyer crossed with a Tammany Hall fixer.”
Planes, Trains and Automobiles teaches the other comedies of errors that an error in character is much more significant than an error in judgment. And much more redeemable. * *[…]
Downsizing is a dystopic satire on American values that has an unsurprising and credible core involving a sick and impoverished underclass. It is credible because the USA is alone among[…]
Comedy · Counterculture · Drama
Everyone in Shampoo is id driven, with the audience taking voyeuristic pleasure at the absence of any self-awareness. George is inarticulate and largely passive, more preyed upon than preying with[…]
Living disillusioned in a post-Brexit Instagram-filtered age, standing at the periphery of the job market in a state of horror as the surplus of impressive graduates wander by, it is[…]
Comedy · Digital · Drama · Youth
In Eighth Grade, Burnham recognizes the pre-teen and teen landscape of 2018 is more intense, due to the pervasive influence of cell phones, voyeurism, self-promotion, and the unhealthy expectations brought[…]
Comedy · Directors · Women in Film
American Audiences watched Irma la Douce without discomfort, perhaps because French prostitutes and pimps were performing immoral acts and misdeeds. The same subversion of middle-class values that would later inform[…]
Comedy · Directors · Drama · Essays · Romance · Silents
Excerpted from McBride’s new critical study, How Did Lubitsch Do It? (Columbia University Press, June 2018), with the kind permission of the author. * * * To maintain the admirable[…]