Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Joker: Laughter Without an Echo Chamber
In Joker, we see a reversal of Tarantino’s aesthetic, where a patently comic character, a joker with a clown face, is, by degrees, rendered tragic, or as near tragic as[…]
Category: Drama
Drama · Religion & Spirituality · War
A Canterbury Tale: A Very British Spirituality . . . and European Too
Overt spirituality is often undermined in this film by bizarrely comic episodes from everyday life. Certainly the most bizarre plot element concerns the Glue Man – someone who attacks young[…]
Drama · Essays · Women in Film
The Love That Needs to Be, Needs to Be: David O. Selznick’s Portrait of Jennie
Show me one who loves; he knows what I mean. – St. Augustine * * * I’m sharing my favorite places with her outside my alma mater: bald, rolling fields[…]
Designers · Drama · Interviews
Uncut Gems: Talking with Production Designer Sam Lisenco
We were really careful in coming up with the look of Howard’s world to make assumptions about how old he was when he would’ve formed his taste, and what that[…]
Drama · Essays · Urban Conflict
Watching Taxi Driver with John Hinckley
Our nation has persisted in this state for so long that when we watch Taxi Driver, we always watch it with John Hinckley. It is a film that forces us[…]
Drama · LGBT & Queer · Russia
Alexander Gorchilin’s Acid (2018): Putin-Friendly Arthouse
My point here isn’t to suggest that Gorchilin and Pecheykin are government lackeys bent on pleasing Vladimir Putin. They’re young filmmakers working in a totalitarian country and have constraints that[…]
Monterey Dreamin’: 45 Years of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
In striving toward “that level of being real,” Burstyn handpicked much of the film’s eventual cast from her Actors Studio cohort – a decision that meshed well with both Scorsese’s[…]
Of Parasites and Their Hosts: Bong Joon-ho’s Gisaengchung (2019)
One of the ways in which Parasite differs from many more naturalistic movies about urban poverty is that access to mediated experience is shown to be a function of opportunity[…]
Comedy · Counterculture · Drama · Sex & Relationships
Who Carries the Banner? Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice 50 Years Later
Concepts of sex and marriage have changed monumentally in the last few decades and still today prove endlessly malleable and undefinable. We spend our whole lives attempting to shape our[…]
Drama · New Media · Philosophy
Videograms of a Revolution: Surveillance, Self-Regulation, and Techno-Progressivism in M. Night Shyamalan’s Glass (2019)
[This review contains spoilers for the films Glass and The Village.] “There are unknown forces that don’t want us to realise what we are truly capable of. They don’t[…]
Asian · Drama · LGBT & Queer
“This Film Is Blessed by the Gods”: Talking with Mag Hsu, Director of Dear Ex (Netflix, 2018)
Hsu Chih-Yen and I immediately agreed that we wanted to represent a Taipei in July, especially the sun in Taipei. Under this July sun, everything is steaming, all the colours[…]
On the Beautiful Pain of Saying Nothing: Desire, Silence, and Visual Inheritance in Pawlikowski’s Cold War and Antonioni’s L’Eclisse
“We’ve avoided saying certain things. Why bring them up now?” – L’Eclisse “Two hearts, four eyes, Crying all day and all night/ Dark eyes, you cry because you can’t be[…]
Time and Friendship in Old Joy (Kelly Reichardt, 2006), or How We Age with Film
The film withholds memory and history from us, always knowing more than us, plot-wise, but inviting and compelling our projection of how we fill the space of our own friendships.[…]
Orpheus Unending, or Beyond and Behind The Fugitive Kind
For a variety of reasons, then, despite its high-gloss finish, the film did not achieve any real commercial success. This is not to say it was an artistic letdown, as[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Drama · Essays · Romance
Adios, Compañeros: Living the Dream of Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood
QT’s films are commonly hurtling toward darkness, yet Once Upon feels like a repudiation, as much as a culmination, of his oeuvre. There’s a point in the experience where the[…]
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[…]
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[…]
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