Drama · Eco · Eco-horror · Essays
Scars and Their Stories: Exploring a Scene from Jaws
What does a scar tell us about a person? Where they’ve been, what they’ve been through, the style in which they conduct their lives. A scar is a reminder, an[…]
Category: Drama
Fake It So Real: Self-Reflexivity, Theatricality, and Authenticity in Leos Carax’s Annette
Just as Holy Motors simultaneously mourned the loss of physicality from filmmaking while embracing the creative possibilities offered by digital technology, Annette is built on a seeming paradox: it plunges[…]
Drama · Mystery · Philosophy · Thrillers & Action
Are You Still Watching? Demonlover (2002) and the Spectre of Voyeurism
This is the central thesis Assayas raises here – instant gratification via the image suggests a greater degree of control over what we consume (including its ethics) when in fact[…]
Celebrity Culture · Crime · Digital · Drama · Societal Trends
Bling around the Collar: How Can We Get Rid of This Dirty Ring?
The Bling Ring’s impossible challenge for us is to reject the moralizing. We feel superior to the teenagers because of the celebrity issue. The four girls and boy represent our[…]
Endless Night: Luchino Visconti’s Le notti bianche
The city of Visconti’s film is a palimpsest in which postwar modernity (nightclubs, movie theatres, beatniks, and loose women) is superimposed on the ruins of the city’s gothic past. Rather[…]
Drama · Indigenous · LGBT & Queer · Migration
Untying the Knot: Ángeles Cruz’s Nudo Mixteco (2021)
In Nudo Mixteco, characters are torn apart and brought together by the combined concerns of labor and trauma: markets are globalized, while individuals evince a panoply of erotic interests, and[…]
Directors · Drama · Essays · Writers & Critics
He’s Thinking of Ending Things: Charlie Kaufman’s Breakup Letter to an Entire Age
Where Reid spends pages and pages absentmindedly ruminating on the many very painful, and very human, distinctions between Self and Other before losing himself in a tonal mess of relationship[…]
Drama · Religion & Spirituality · Writers & Critics
Two Perspectives on Sainthood in 1951: Roberto Rossellini’s Europe ’51 and Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair
Graham Greene could be a very political writer (nowhere more than in The Quiet American, which was his next major work after The End of the Affair), but Christianity has[…]
Drama · Eco · Eco-horror · Horror
Don’t Go Near the Water: Revisiting Four ’70s Eco-Horror Films
I’ve detailed each film to convey the strange and strict extent to which they each cohere to one base fear: reproductive control. The only hope for human survival in Phase[…]
“No Viking Atheists”: The Northman’s Journey into Old World Belief
In my theater’s showing, the instant that Fjölnir lost his head in the climactic volcano battle, an elderly woman left her seat, lingering at the door a moment before exiting.[…]
Costume Drama · Designers · Drama · Fashion · Melodrama · Photo Essays · Romance
What Unwed Mothers Wore in 1946: Ulmer’s Her Sister’s Secret and Leisen’s To Each His Own
In difficult times, fashion is always outrageous. – Elsa Schiaparelli * * * Edgar G. Ulmer’s Her Sister’s Secret was released to theaters the same year as Mitchell Leisen’s To[…]
Absurdism · Comedy · Drama · French Cinema · Mystery · Psychology
Fathoming the Phantom: On Bunuel’s The Phantom of Liberty
The question becomes: is it worth trying to be free? Is the struggle fruitless? Why can’t we escape our servitude to the past, to society, to others? * * *[…]
Drama · Women in Film · Writers & Critics
Novel into Film: Adapting Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter
We come to find out as viewers, whether we believe in Leda’s self-governing comportment at the beginning or not, that this task of motherhood is never-ending; each work demonstrates to[…]
African American · Drama · Dreams · Horror · Urban Conflict
Candymen: Slumming, Scarifying, and Gentrifying in 1992 and 2022
Good mornin’, Mr. Benson, I see you’re doin’ well. If I had me a shotgun I’d blow you straight to hell. – Robert Hunter/Jerry Garcia, “Candyman,” 1970 * * *[…]
Drama · War · Writers & Critics
Designated Mourner: On Christian Petzold’s Transit
The refugees’ babel is a constant background presence in Seghers’s novel, a kind of Greek chorus commenting on the various ship arrivals and departures, and spreading news of any developments[…]
Billy Wilder’s “Home Run with the Bases Loaded”: Some Keys to The Apartment
In the corporate world the film depicts, the lower-level executives are small-time Lotharios who seek no more than sex from female underlings. Their boss, however, battens on the love he[…]
Directors · Drama · Outsiders · War · Writers & Critics
“Write Some Good Ones”: How Billy Wilder’s Most Autobiographical Film Was Directed by Somebody Else
Rumanian refugee Georges Iscovescu (Charles Boyer) conning a guileless California schoolteacher, Emmy Brown (Olivia de Havilland, in an Oscar-nominated role), into marrying him so he can enter the United States[…]
Crime · Drama · Production History
The Godfather, Part III: The One Who Inspired It
“Dedicated to Charlie Bluhdorn who inspired it.” * * * Not only is Mario Puzo’s The Godfather the stuff of Hollywood legend, but so is its turbulent production. Even after[…]
Counterculture · Directors · Drama · Interviews · Restorations
My My, Hey Hey, Out of the Blue Is Here to Stay: John Alan Simon and Elizabeth Karr Talk about the Restoration of Dennis Hopper’s Masterpiece
Dennis wasn’t originally hired to direct Out of the Blue, rather he was hired to act in it. After about a week of shooting, the production manager, Paul Lewis, who[…]
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Drama · Silents · Women in Film
An Innocent Lulu: How Pabst Rewrote Wedekind in Pandora’s Box
If she is seen simply as a free spirit, a woman who lives for sexual pleasure, and as exemplary on that account, a model liberated woman (as Louise Brooks herself[…]
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