“Look Closer”: The Life Behind American Beauty
“Death is the mother of beauty.” – Wallace Stevens “I choose the ugly as well as the beautiful, knowing it will all be beautiful soon enough.” – Marvin Bell *[…]
Category: Drama
Directors · Drama · Religion & Spirituality
The Secret of Creativity: The Inspirations of Paul Schrader’s First Reformed
“That’s the secret of creativity. You have to steal around. If you keep going back to that same 7-Eleven, they’re going to catch you. So you go over to the[…]
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Actors & Personalities · Drama · Westerns · Women in Film
Tea in Monument Valley: On Vera Miles and The Searchers
An excerpt from Vera Miles: The Hitchcock Blonde Who Got Away, to be released March 25 by University Press of Kentucky, exploring Miles’s impressive career and her relationships with the[…]
Leaving Las Vegas Turns 30: A Savior-Less Portrait of Liquor-Soaked Love and Despair Not for the Faint of Heart
“I don’t know if I started drinking ‘cause my wife left me or my wife left me ‘cause I started drinking but fuck it anyway.” – Ben Sanderson, Leaving Las[…]
Actors & Personalities · Drama · Essays
In Magnolia, Tom Cruise Far Outperformed Real-Life Andrew Tate
Cruise’s performance as Mackey offers a unique opportunity to make sense of a Tate, and to see what all really lies right under the surface of this ongoing phenomenon. *[…]
Aging · Class System · Drama · Hollywood
The Right Picture: Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow, the So-Called Most Depressing Movie of All Time
We are grateful that Bark and Lucy and what they represent are able to exist. That such people have gone before, even if it meant going before in a work[…]
Drama · LGBT & Queer · Romance
Boy Meets Boy: Young Hearts Ushers In a New Era of Queer Cinema
Elias does not label his sexuality, simply telling his mother: “I’m in love with Alexander.” That neither Elias nor Alexander labels his sexuality serves the film well. It is an[…]
Activist & Political · Counterculture · Drama · Exploitation & Erotica · Indies · LGBT & Queer · Neo-Noir · New Genres · Noir · Road Movies · Sex & Relationships
Queer Is the New Noir: How Femme, Love Lies Bleeding, and Drive Away Dolls Queer Up the Genre
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 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[…]
Drama · DVD & Blu-ray · Melodrama · Silents
Of Sexual Hate and Lonely Death: Pandora’s Box on Criterion
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
Chaotic Coherence: Revisiting Don’t Look Now (1973) in the Wake of Sutherland’s Death
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.[…]
If You Can See It: Elvis, Scorsese, and Will Mossop
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[…]
Perfect Tuesdays: How Wim Wenders Taught Me It’s Wrong to Watch Movies on a Weekday Morning
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
Borders Without Doctors: Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border
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
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[…]
Directors · Drama · DVD & Blu-ray · Westerns
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid: Revisiting Sam Peckinpah’s Unrealized Western on Criterion
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
Bresson, Schrader, and the Fool: Transcendental and Materialist Interpretations in the Films of Robert Bresson
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
What Hides in Plain Sight? Against the Backdrop of Tár
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”: 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[…]
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