I’m Thinking of Ending Things and Men Writing Women
I’m Thinking of Ending Things is, like so many stories, a story about a man masquerading as a story about a woman. Which ultimately makes me wonder why we need[…]
Category: Drama
Troubling Mastery: Scorsese’s and Kubrick’s Psychosexual New York Odysseys
About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position. – W. H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux-Arts” (1940) “It’s also a film I cherish[…]
Drama · Eastern European · Festivals & Awards · Russia
The Soviet Past Spoils Romanian Documentary Cinema: Adrian Pîrvu’s Everything Will Not Be Fine and Leontina Vatamanu’s Siberia in the Bones
There would be nothing wrong with taking sides in such a heated ideological debate if any of the five films screened this year in the prestigious Romanian Days section of[…]
Activist & Political · African American · Drama
“Don’t talk to us about being killed”: Uptight and the Problem of Black Cinema in Hollywood
Like Dassin’s 1950 noir classic Night and the City, Uptight is shot predominantly at night, with oddly titled camera angles and bright, glaring colours, ironically organised around the shades of[…]
Drama · Horror · Women in Film
The Birds Is Us: Where Did We Come From?
The movie is, literally, a projection of our mental landscape. We passively sit back (like Jeffries in Rear Window) and the world appears as we live and make it. We[…]
Positive Freedoms in a Negative Space: Revisiting Mädchen in Uniform
From these socio-erotic negotiations sprung cinema’s first expressly lesbian-themed feature, Mädchen in Uniform (1931), not simply a tale of forbidden love but a historically particular challenge to Weimar Germany’s separation[…]
Drama · Essays · Urban Conflict
Fighting for a Place to Be: Urban Space in Tangerine and The Florida Project
This conditional access to space is also there in Tangerine, but it is never tested to the breaking point. The conflicts that occur between the characters and the managers of[…]
#MeToo · Activist & Political · Drama · Women in Film · Workplace
#MeToo in Three Recent Films: The Assistant, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, and On the Record
#MeToo has been an unequivocal success in terms of calling out the rampant sexual abuse that exists in the veins of Hollywood, but has been less successful in allowing room[…]
Directors · Drama · Interviews
On Driveways and Spa Night: Talking with Director Andrew Ahn
“I try very hard to give the characters in my films a sense of humanity. I want this feeling for the audience that these characters exist outside of the frame.[…]
Drama · Interior Monologue · Letters
Just a Violet: On Gillian Armstrong’s Mrs. Soffel
(interpolating material by Paul Simon, John Sebastian, Johnny Jewel, Johnny Mercer, Emily Jane Meluch, Conor Oberst, Jaret Ray Reddick, and Eddie Argos) * * * The weight of the world[…]
Drama · Historical & Epic · SF & Fantasy · TV & Streaming
A Song of Ire: Game of Thrones, A Year Later
It is a fascinating exercise to consume this show according to the twenty-first-century rules of binge-watching. As the hours pass and the on-screen death count rises, the sustained passivity of[…]
Absurdism · Comedy · Drama · Eastern European · Horror
The Cremator (1969): In Love with Death
The Cremator, only Juraj Herz’s second film, was adapted from a novel by Ladislav Fuks. It was well received, won a few awards, and was promptly banned for two decades[…]
Drama · Fashion · Noir · Women in Film
“Put the Blame on Mame”: Fragmentation and Commodification in Gilda
The fact that even if that zipper did come down it would simply reveal more dress, a never-ending vortex of clasps and corsets leading to nowhere, seems precisely what the[…]
Drama · Historical & Epic · Women in Film
The Natural Deconstruction of Entrapment: The Beguiled
Where Siegel goes sleazy and conflictual, Coppola goes subtle and sympathetic. Her direction (which won her the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival, making her only the second[…]
Cityscapes · Counterculture · Directors · Drama · Sex & Relationships
Jacques Demy’s Model Shop (1969): The “Baroque Geometry” of Los Angeles in the 1960s
“I reckon LA as the noisiest, the smelliest, the most uncomfortable and most uncivilized major city in the United States. In short, a stinking sewer. . . .”1 – Adam[…]
Activist & Political · Asian · Drama · Societal Trends
Melting into Air: The Late Hu Bo and the (Enduring) Sixth Generation
Hu Bo leaves us suspended over this bleak interregnum – where the old has gone but the new is not yet born. His death too, leaves a similar blank spot.[…]
Psycho as Comedy: The Joke’s on Everyone
We can further associate the filmmaker, the man with whom we’ve placed our narrative trust, with the “psycho” of both the title and our typical image of one, the latter[…]
Drama · Melodrama · Pre-Code · Romance · War
Love Stories in Harrowing Times: On Waterloo Bridge (1931) and Little Man, What Now? (1934)
James Whale’s Waterloo Bridge (1931) and Frank Borzage’s Little Man, What Now? (1934) depict human possibility in terms of what can transpire between two ordinary people, while holding out little[…]
Drama · Women in Film · Workplace
Silence and the Loss of Self: On Kitty Green’s The Assistant (2019)
The dull humdrum of the office takes on a kind of bizarre poetry: you find yourself humming along to the copier, placing kitchen objects in patterned formations, making slightly stranger,[…]
Drama · Literature and Film · Russia · SF & Fantasy
Intimately Alien: Conflicting Ideologies in Solyaris (1968) and Solaris (1972)
While there can be no doubt Solyaris is no artistic masterpiece, the idea that it isn’t a product of its time is more complicated. To the extent that the film[…]
