Sexual Politics: On Olivier Assayas’s Non-Fiction
What interests me (and I suspect, Assayas) is not so much the substance of these dinner table debates, which tend to move in predictable repeating circles, as their texture. People[…]
Category: Drama
Drama · Music & Musicals · War
Singing in the Rubble: A Musical Map of the Cold War in Paweł Pawlikowski’s Cold War
Suddenly jazz became a major taboo in Soviet society until Stalin’s death. In Western Europe, by contrast, mainly in Paris, jazz took off after the Nazis’ defeat in the hues[…]
Dispatch from Tribeca #5: Lucky Grandma
“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.”[…]
Dispatch from Tribeca #4: Standing Up, Falling Down
In her fourth report from the Tribeca Film Festival, Claire Baiz looks at first-time feature director Matt Ratner’s intriguing family drama Standing Up, Falling Down, which, as a thoughtful film[…]
Chronicler(s) of the End of the End: On Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego’s Pájaros de Verano (Birds of Passage) (2018)
“The root of oppression is loss of memory.” – Paula Gunn Allen1 * * * The end of the world is a mansion in the middle of the desert. A[…]
Drama · Historical & Epic · Women in Film
On Pain, Intimacy, and Women Who Want: Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite, #MeToo, and the Afterglow of Pasolini’s Salò
These women want their words to be heard. They want their will to be known. They want to be able to change their minds. And they want the full mind-body[…]
Roma: A Meditation on (Male) Mobility and (Female) Immobility
Even the languid pace Cuarón uses throughout the film seems to want to elevate the (feminine and domestic) virtue of soul-nurturing stillness over the (masculine) trait of destructive freneticism. Some[…]
Drama · Horror · SF & Fantasy
Facing “Ultraviolence”: Blindness as Insight in Bird Box
Given the fact that sex and violence are alleged to be as normalized in our culture as wind blowing through the trees, in Bird Box, Malorie’s shock even appears prudish[…]
Mother Nature: Ramón Salazar’s La Enfermedad del Domingo (2018)
“All the things we should’ve said that I never said/ All the things we should’ve done that we never did/ All the things we should’ve given but I didn’t/ Oh,[…]
Comedy · Counterculture · Drama
Lather, Rinse, Repeat: The Enduring Charms of Shampoo
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[…]
Godot’s Never Coming: Almacenados’ Anti-Absurdist Vision of the Workplace
The Prince: “I haven’t yet had a report from your office. What’s your work like?” The Warden: “Every night the same. Every night till the heart beats as if it[…]
Peter Yates’ Breaking Away at 40: An Early Warning of America’s Culture War
Theirs is a passive outlook, young men products of a culture that for too many generations has grown to depend on a corporate entity, mistaking the mill for a permanent,[…]
Working-Class Heroes, Angry Young Men, and a Reprobate Redeemed: BFI’s Woodfall: A Revolution in British Cinema
Look Back in Anger (Tony Richardson, 1959); The Entertainer (Tony Richardson, 1960); Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1960); A Taste of Honey (Tony Richardson, 1961); The Loneliness of[…]
Sunshine and Coconut Milk: The Criterion Collection Serves Up Midnight Cowboy
Nearly fifty years after its release, it’s clear Midnight Cowboy pulled off a neat trick. Its story of a naïve “Texas longhorn bull” hustler and a low-rent con man is[…]
Michael Clayton: Hollywood’s Last Movie for Adults
Michael Clayton is a character who gets a wake-up call. It’s not an “oh, wow, they killed off that character” moment, it’s not a clever reveal, it’s not an “instant[…]
Drama · Historical & Epic · War
Casablanca and The Third Man in a World Made by War
The Third Man ends with rejection, physical and emotional death, a descent into a sewer, a walk through a graveyard and cold silence. The ruins of Vienna come to symbolize[…]
When Heaven Came to Earth: Letter to My Millennial Friend on Alan Rudolph’s Made in Heaven, Shot the Year You Were Born
MY CHUM, JANE LILEE, Being as it’s coming up on the anniversary of our meeting, I thought I’d check in with you, and maybe get points for remembering the occasion.[…]
Watch It Again: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
The high-tech and the primitive coexist in The Life Aquatic, much as they do in Keaton’s The Navigator, and as in all of Anderson’s films they combine with the deeply[…]
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