Desire as a Postcard: Michael Mann’s Cinema and the Postmodern Male Subject
In a world in which the space of the city, once peremptorily defined by its lights and shadows, has been transformed into a reflection of itself devoid of identity, an[…]
Category: Crime
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[…]
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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.[…]
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[…]
Crime · Essays · Thrillers & Action
Trigger Warning, or: How Jessica Alba Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Woke Imperialism
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[…]
Class System · Crime · Essays · Race
“Who Gets a Trial, Who Gets Killed”: Race, Class, and Legal Morality in the Film Versions of To Kill a Mockingbird and A Time to Kill
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[…]
Class System · Crime · Hollywood · Noir · Pre-Code
Rocky Died Yellow: Matinee Polemics
When the Production Code loosened and America lurched through assassinations, riots, and televised body bags, the gangster stopped functioning as a moral lesson and started reading as a symptom –[…]
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[…]
Crime · LGBT & Queer · Men & Masculinity · Sex & Relationships
Cruising: The Boys in (Black and) Blue
“I don’t make a film because I’m against something. For that matter, I don’t make a film because I’m for something — don’t make propaganda. If anything, all the films[…]
Crime · Franchises & Series · Horror
Hidden Horrors: Jeepers Creepers
Perhaps for some, knowing the real-life context heightens the film’s effect. Or it irreparably takes the viewer out of the experience. In either case, the Creeper is, in fact, a[…]
Crime · Drama · Sex & Relationships · SF & Fantasy
Presence Tension: The Scary of 61st
This leaves the provocateur director herself in her role as catalyst for the mayhem to follow as the ultimate filmic presence wreaking its influence on others. Assigned only the title[…]
Crime · Noir · Photo Essays
Barflies and Hot Lies: The Fifties B-Girl and Fritz Lang’s Subversive Politics in The Big Heat
Debby refuses to be a passive victim of Vince Stone’s violence, fighting back and branding his face with boiling coffee as revenge. But while she’s no helpless victim, Lang’s ending[…]
Crime · Drama · Neo-Noir · Women in Film
“Oh, look”: From Male-Wary Gaze to Objectifying Female Gaze in Gone Girl
“Oh, look. He’s being a good guy, so everybody can see him being a good guy.” – Officer James Gilpin observing Nick Dunne in Gone Girl (2014) There are many[…]
To Live and Die in LA (1985) and the Thrill-Seeking Wasteland of Reagan’s America
However, while other filmmakers got caught up in the heady, cocaine rush of the 1980s, Friedkin was harder to convince. When we dig a little deeper into his Los Angeles,[…]
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,[…]
Murder by Contract: The Same as Any Business
The film is intent on the present, an element of the fifties go-getter types and the emergence of the organization man. The stress on “man” comes during post-World War II[…]
Crime · Drama · Family · French Cinema · Linguistics and Language
Anatomy of a Fall and the Expatriate’s Predicament
Daniel is presented as a talented pianist, with an intellect of one well beyond his years. He is both strong-willed and sensitive. He is affectionate with his mother, yet culturally[…]
Crime · Directors · Drama · Historical & Epic
Simply Human: Bob Clark’s Murder by Decree
The animal is the only genuine thing in man. – Frank Wedekind * * * A woman sits rhythmically rocking by candlelight, her eyes focused on a distant point. Around[…]
Crime · Drama · Historical & Epic · Indigenous · Native Americans
Family Viewing: The Osage Nation, the Reign of Terror, and Killers of the Flower Moon
Killers interweaves the Western, film noir, the gangster film, the police procedural, the courtroom drama, and even a bit of horror; however, it jumps between them with often elliptical editing[…]
Books · Crime · Directors · Drama · Franchises & Series · War
Book Review: Sam Wasson, The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story. Harper, November 2023, 400pp, $32.99
Coppola not only lived for his films but also lived in and through them, in a constant process of inventing and reinventing himself both as an artist and as a[…]
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