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[…]
Category: Drama
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[…]
Comedy · Drama · Festivals & Awards
Dispatch from Tribeca #5: Short Takes on To Dust, Song of Back and Neck, Diane
To Dust (dir. Shawn Snyder) “Isn’t that sweet,” I thought when I picked up my mother’s dropped pocket calendar. So many dates had names on them. Mom doesn’t want to[…]
Dispatch from Tribeca #2: Ghostbox Cowboy: Capitalists in the Coffee Shop
I don’t like these three guys in this coffee shop either. I can’t help but compare them to the Ghostbox opportunists who were written to be disliked. That much –[…]
Drama · SF & Fantasy · Women in Film
The End of Cinema: Female Agency and the Influence of Stalker in Annihilation
Even as it has sunk like a stone commercially, Annihilation has drawn a flurry of passionate responses, mainly, it seems, from women writers. Many single out its admixture of beauty[…]
Designers · Drama · Women in Film
Food, Fashion, and (Fe)male Identity in The Phantom Thread
This is the second of two pieces on Phantom Thread. See Sam Ankenbauer’s different take in the previous post. * * * The articulation of female pleasure in The Phantom[…]
Secret Lives: On Phantom Thread
Note: This is the first of two reviews of Phantom Thread. Watch for Raymond De Luca’s take later this week. Each viewing paints old interactions in new colors, and the film thrives[…]
Lady Bird, Lady Bird, What the Heck Are You?
The internal structure of Lady Bird is, I think, unconsciously designed to evoke the monster mother and then deflect the daughterly hostility she provokes by turning things around to insist,[…]
Activist & Political · Drama · Essays
Beatriz at Dinner: Eating Up the Whole World
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a[…]
Drama · LGBT & Queer · SF & Fantasy
A Fine Romance? On Call Me by Your Name
As in romance novels, the excitement of sexual provocation is the heart of the story. It occupies two-thirds of the film: “His finger brushed mine” developed in fifteen stages. The[…]
Biopic · Directors · Drama · Experimental & Underground
James Franco’s The Disaster Artist: Hollywood Caught in the Act of Kissing Its Own Ass
“Hollywood oddballs are like everything else in Hollywood. Don’t look too close.” * * * Greg Sestero’s now reasonably famous book The Disaster Artist, co-written by Tom Bissell, is much[…]
Drama · Philosophy · SF & Fantasy
I am Blade Runner 2049, Blade Runner 2049 is I
“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain By the false azure in the window pane. I was the smudge of ashen fluff – and I Lived on, flew on,[…]
Actors & Personalities · Drama · DVD & Blu-ray · Silents
Boxcars, Beery, and a Dutch Bob: William Wellman’s Beggars of Life (1928) on Blu-ray
What we see in Brooks and Beery on the screen is a mixup of the actors’ hardwired personalities and those contrived for their roles, but this is the sort of[…]
Wonderstruck II: Todd Haynes’ Places of Discovery and Wonder
Wonderstruck seems a retreat from some of Haynes’ established themes, in that it’s not set in the fifties and, as a PG-rated, child-oriented adventure film, instead pursues the marvelous and[…]
Wonderstruck I: Synchronizing the Heart with the Eyes
Haynes spares us slack-jawed bug-eyed Spielbergian reactions shots, but he also denies us deep emotional engagement. The visuals shadow and overwhelm the actors as they wander the bustling Haynes-Selznick landscapes.[…]
Drama · Essays · Uncategorized
Running, Reeling, Floating Free – On Hidden Figures, Humanity and Paper Balloons, City Streets
Isn’t something less reassuring and a lot more interesting going on – something more inclusive, diverse, and genuinely universal? * * * There are still too many human beings on[…]
Drama · Memoir · Religion & Spirituality · Women in Film
On the Trail and Off the Grid: The Gender of Wild in Wild and Into the Wild
Both protagonists undertake a kind of “work of the self,” whereby they simultaneously come to terms with trauma – in one case, paternal betrayal, in the other, maternal abandonment by[…]
Watch It Again! Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1971)
Peckinpah’s ethics and form are evinced best in his sixth film, Straw Dogs, where we also discover the key to his aesthetic of violence. David Sumner takes a sabbatical to Yorkshire,[…]
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