Good Grief: Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers
“Solving” the film’s psychological mysteries – understanding how Adam’s ghosts arise from his grief – is the film’s central interpretive demand, and one of its pleasures. It’s the film’s conclusion[…]
Category: Drama
Drama · Eco · Games & Gaming · Literature and Film · SF & Fantasy · War
Villeneuve’s Dune, Warhammer 40K, and the Next Frontier of Space Operas
The everyday hero is a foreign concept in a universe where obscure machinations corrode a society that blindly follows in the hopes of stability and lasting glory. * * *[…]
Drama · Eco · Eco-horror · Horror · Urban Conflict
Garbageman: C.H.U.D. at 40
On the face of it, C.H.U.D. might look like a superficial protest against this schema – like a trite version of David and Goliath wherein the tenacity of a neighbourhood[…]
Actors & Personalities · Books · Drama
Book Review: Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? By Philip Gefter
Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? By Philip Gefter. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024. $42.00 * * * I love “making of”[…]
Drama · Philosophy · SF & Fantasy
On 2001: A Space Odyssey: The Monolith and Its Influences
In this new reading of 2001, the monolith is used as a touchstone for considering a dozen tangents into iconoclastic cinema, the human and simian response to enigma, and the[…]
Biopic · Drama · Men & Masculinity · Military and Paramilitary
Confessions of a Masc: On Paul Schrader’s Mishima
Words, and the internal fictions they represented, would never be enough to join Mishima’s corporeal self to the abstract notion of beauty except in a dreamlike capacity, which would not[…]
Crime · Drama · Family · French Cinema · Linguistics and Language
Anatomy of a Fall and the Expatriate’s Predicament
Daniel is presented as a talented pianist, with an intellect of one well beyond his years. He is both strong-willed and sensitive. He is affectionate with his mother, yet culturally[…]
Asian · Drama · Experimental & Underground
Auto-Focus: Reflexivity, Autocritique, and Formal Experimentation in Hong Sang-soo’s In Water (2023)
The reflexive nature of Hong’s formalism, in which stylistic decisions call attention to themselves and point to the mediating presence of the man behind the camera, makes it problematic to[…]
Book Review: Terrence Malick and the Examined Life, by Martin Woessner. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024. $65.00
Malick, in other words, is a director who established himself during the transition from Old Hollywood to New Hollywood, where experimenting became the norm, and it is while experimenting at[…]
Drama · Historical & Epic · Holocaust
The Air We Breathe: Ecology and Atmosphere in The Zone of Interest (2023)
If the choking of the camp victims is muffled in the film, it is darkly recapitulated in the sputtering coughs that spread through the family, from Höss to Hedwig’s mother.[…]
Absurdism · Cityscapes · Drama · Literature and Film · Writers & Critics
Cosmopolis: A DeLillo–Cronenberg Mutation
Cosmopolis reflects the experience of a cancer patient, housed within a corporatized institution, dependent on the biases and whims of authorities, machines, and data. The book and film, poorly reviewed[…]
Actors & Personalities · Drama · Essays · Romance
Gazing at Gary Cooper: Sex, Power, Gender, and the Body in Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938), Ball of Fire (1941), and Love in the Afternoon (1957)
As with Monroe, his seemingly all-but-transparent method has proven remarkably difficult to emulate, much less duplicate. (Toles, 2003: 34) Whatever happened to Gary Cooper? The strong, silent type? That was[…]
Horror Held in Sunbeams Along the Garden Wall: On The Zone of Interest and the Mundanity of Preservation
Sunbeams, radiant and warm. Human bodies, young and old. And who are imprisoned here, our hearts are yet not cold. We who are imprisoned here, are wakeful as the stars[…]
Crime · Directors · Drama · Historical & Epic
Simply Human: Bob Clark’s Murder by Decree
The animal is the only genuine thing in man. – Frank Wedekind * * * A woman sits rhythmically rocking by candlelight, her eyes focused on a distant point. Around[…]
Crime · Drama · Historical & Epic · Indigenous · Native Americans
Family Viewing: The Osage Nation, the Reign of Terror, and Killers of the Flower Moon
Killers interweaves the Western, film noir, the gangster film, the police procedural, the courtroom drama, and even a bit of horror; however, it jumps between them with often elliptical editing[…]
Books · Crime · Directors · Drama · Franchises & Series · War
Book Review: Sam Wasson, The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story. Harper, November 2023, 400pp, $32.99
Coppola not only lived for his films but also lived in and through them, in a constant process of inventing and reinventing himself both as an artist and as a[…]
Activist & Political · Comedy · Drama
Reactionary Politics: On Sean Price Williams’s The Sweet East (2023)
It’s easy to mistake The Sweet East for a progressive indictment of modern America, with its gun-wielding conspiracy theorists and predatory authority figures – but they belie a blasé politics[…]
“Nothing Inside”: On Pablo Larraín’s El Conde (2023)
This man who watches you returns from hell […]; he is hollow, he is full of air. Dry hands hold him upright from behind, like a house of cards being[…]
Activist & Political · Directors · Drama · Labor
Strategizing Solidarity: Ken Loach’s The Old Oak (2023)
“There can be no resistance without memory or universalism” – Jean-Luc Godard, In Praise of Love (2001) * * * With his new feature, The Old Oak (2023), Ken Loach[…]
The (Asian) American Dream: Neoliberal Feminism, Orientalism, and Ambivalence in Crazy Rich Asians
Crazy Rich Asians’ re-orientalization of Asians reinforces Eurocentrism and the Western gaze. Feminist and Orientalist readings of this film ultimately divulge the ability of Asians in the West to subconsciously[…]
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