Activist & Political · Counterculture · Drama · Exploitation & Erotica · Indies · LGBT & Queer · Neo-Noir · New Genres · Noir · Road Movies · Sex & Relationships
Though several deliciously sordid queer noirs have made their way into the cultural fabric of the past decades (Mulholland Dr. [2001], Stranger By The Lake [2013], The Handmaiden [2016]), 2024[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors · Drama
“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[…]
Drama · DVD & Blu-ray · Melodrama · Silents
When what you write about is what you see/What do you write about when it’s dark? ~ Charles Wright “You’ll have to kill me to get rid of me.” Criterion’s[…]
Actors & Personalities · Drama · Horror · Memorial · Mystery · Thrillers & Action
In Don’t Look Now, so much of this atmosphere hinges on the film’s unique style, one that often gets in the way of smooth narrative communication and clearly defined characters.[…]
It’s in Hobson’s Choice that De Banzie and Mills effect one of the warmest and most real accounts of love and marriage ever put on film. Of many effortlessly achieved[…]
Keiko reveals two traumatic truths, both in the form of questions to Hirayama, that cause us to fundamentally rethink our perceptions, namely (1) do you ever intend on visiting our[…]
Drama · Exile and Displacement · Neorealism · Refugees
Green Border soars and stumbles because it overreaches in its gravitas and humanity, lingering a little too long and stretching a moment out of shape like all great neorealist films[…]
Crime · Drama · Sex & Relationships · SF & Fantasy
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[…]
Directors · Drama · DVD & Blu-ray · Westerns
Action scenes are what a summer audience wants, but in Pat Garrett the shootouts become episodic and lack the ratcheting up of tension, followed by its release at the climactic[…]
Drama · French Cinema · Uncategorized · Writers & Critics
I think the reason Bresson’s films resist singular interpretations is that they are composed of multiple, overlapping perspectives. His films contain elements of humanism, nihilism, absurdism, existentialism, transcendentalism, and numerous[…]
Drama · LGBT & Queer · Music & Musicals
In Tár, Field fashions an improbable representation of power (Hernández, “Top Orchestras”) to advance the idea that power is faceless. But the idea is only to be believed if the[…]
Crime · Drama · Neo-Noir · Women in Film
“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[…]
Drama · Politics · Thrillers & Action
On its 30th anniversary, it also feels remarkably relevant in the wake of the recent Supreme Court ruling that presidents have absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for exercising “core” executive[…]
Comedy · Drama · Interviews · Picaresque · Producers & Studios
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[…]
“Solving” the film’s psychological mysteries – understanding how Adam’s ghosts arise from his grief – is the film’s central interpretive demand, and one of its pleasures. It’s the film’s conclusion[…]
Drama · Eco · Games & Gaming · Literature and Film · SF & Fantasy · War
The everyday hero is a foreign concept in a universe where obscure machinations corrode a society that blindly follows in the hopes of stability and lasting glory. * * *[…]
Drama · Eco · Eco-horror · Horror · Urban Conflict
On the face of it, C.H.U.D. might look like a superficial protest against this schema – like a trite version of David and Goliath wherein the tenacity of a neighbourhood[…]
Actors & Personalities · Books · Drama
Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? By Philip Gefter. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024. $42.00 * * * I love “making of”[…]
Drama · Philosophy · SF & Fantasy
In this new reading of 2001, the monolith is used as a touchstone for considering a dozen tangents into iconoclastic cinema, the human and simian response to enigma, and the[…]
