Aftersun: The Skin of Filmic Memory
We all wait for everything to come into focus, and if we are lucky, we might eventually get access to one snapshot that tells an incomplete story. So naturally, while[…]
Category: Drama
Comedy · Drama · French Cinema
Amélie, or, Only the Beginning
Amélie brings life to the unseen. * * * Talk with someone about a piece of art, and they’ll tell you about themselves. Let me share my thoughts on Amélie,[…]
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Actors & Personalities · Directors · Drama · Women in Film
Ida Lupino: Demon Mother Night
“[H]er favorite expression of strained intensity would be less quickly relieved by a merciful death than by Ex-Lax.”
Comedy · Communism and Socialism · Directors · Drama · Eastern European · Russia · War · Writers & Critics
Hungarian Plays into American Movies: Billy Wilder’s Five Graves to Cairo and One, Two, Three
Billy Wilder turned to these two plays because they offered the situations, structure, and characters that would allow his imagination to flower and create contemporary stories – a patriotic military[…]
Crime · Drama · Women in Film
Bitches Brew: On Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar (2002)
Ramsay uses the distinct qualities of cinema, images and sound, to immerse you in the psychic space of her characters – and what an uncommonly beautiful space it is. It’s[…]
African American · Comedy · Drama · Eco · Race · Urban Conflict
Can’t Stand the Heat: Weather and Climate Change in Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing
The fundamental question of who will suffer the most from extreme heat, and on a broader scale climate change, is bound to systemic issues of race and class. Through Lee’s[…]
The Fabelmans: Spielberg and the Cinema of Re-Empowerment
“Movies are dreams, doll, that you never forget,” says Mrs. Fabelman (Michelle Williams). She’s circling the nature of them, which the critic Andre Bazin described when he called cinema “an[…]
Dance · Drama · Exile and Displacement · Poverty · Theory
Dancing Diagonals: Movement and Far-Away-Ness in Fernando Frías de la Parra’s Ya No Estoy Aquí (2019)
One of Frías de la Parra’s masterstrokes is to highlight the similar ways in which Monterrey and New York (otherwise such radically distinct cities) are brimming with diagonal lines: in[…]
Drama · Eco · Eco-horror · Essays
Scars and Their Stories: Exploring a Scene from Jaws
What does a scar tell us about a person? Where they’ve been, what they’ve been through, the style in which they conduct their lives. A scar is a reminder, an[…]
Fake It So Real: Self-Reflexivity, Theatricality, and Authenticity in Leos Carax’s Annette
Just as Holy Motors simultaneously mourned the loss of physicality from filmmaking while embracing the creative possibilities offered by digital technology, Annette is built on a seeming paradox: it plunges[…]
Drama · Mystery · Philosophy · Thrillers & Action
Are You Still Watching? Demonlover (2002) and the Spectre of Voyeurism
This is the central thesis Assayas raises here – instant gratification via the image suggests a greater degree of control over what we consume (including its ethics) when in fact[…]
Celebrity Culture · Crime · Digital · Drama · Societal Trends
Bling around the Collar: How Can We Get Rid of This Dirty Ring?
The Bling Ring’s impossible challenge for us is to reject the moralizing. We feel superior to the teenagers because of the celebrity issue. The four girls and boy represent our[…]
Endless Night: Luchino Visconti’s Le notti bianche
The city of Visconti’s film is a palimpsest in which postwar modernity (nightclubs, movie theatres, beatniks, and loose women) is superimposed on the ruins of the city’s gothic past. Rather[…]
Drama · Indigenous · LGBT & Queer · Migration
Untying the Knot: Ángeles Cruz’s Nudo Mixteco (2021)
In Nudo Mixteco, characters are torn apart and brought together by the combined concerns of labor and trauma: markets are globalized, while individuals evince a panoply of erotic interests, and[…]
Directors · Drama · Essays · Writers & Critics
He’s Thinking of Ending Things: Charlie Kaufman’s Breakup Letter to an Entire Age
Where Reid spends pages and pages absentmindedly ruminating on the many very painful, and very human, distinctions between Self and Other before losing himself in a tonal mess of relationship[…]
Drama · Religion & Spirituality · Writers & Critics
Two Perspectives on Sainthood in 1951: Roberto Rossellini’s Europe ’51 and Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair
Graham Greene could be a very political writer (nowhere more than in The Quiet American, which was his next major work after The End of the Affair), but Christianity has[…]
Drama · Eco · Eco-horror · Horror
Don’t Go Near the Water: Revisiting Four ’70s Eco-Horror Films
I’ve detailed each film to convey the strange and strict extent to which they each cohere to one base fear: reproductive control. The only hope for human survival in Phase[…]
“No Viking Atheists”: The Northman’s Journey into Old World Belief
In my theater’s showing, the instant that Fjölnir lost his head in the climactic volcano battle, an elderly woman left her seat, lingering at the door a moment before exiting.[…]
Costume Drama · Designers · Drama · Fashion · Melodrama · Photo Essays · Romance
What Unwed Mothers Wore in 1946: Ulmer’s Her Sister’s Secret and Leisen’s To Each His Own
In difficult times, fashion is always outrageous. – Elsa Schiaparelli * * * Edgar G. Ulmer’s Her Sister’s Secret was released to theaters the same year as Mitchell Leisen’s To[…]
Absurdism · Comedy · Drama · French Cinema · Mystery · Psychology
Fathoming the Phantom: On Bunuel’s The Phantom of Liberty
The question becomes: is it worth trying to be free? Is the struggle fruitless? Why can’t we escape our servitude to the past, to society, to others? * * *[…]
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