Human beings have an infinite capacity to adapt to the most adverse circumstances; what other animal can thrive in both the hottest deserts and the coldest mountains? Watching Room, I[…]
What I want to lose here is any suggestion that there’s only one solution to the problem of getting through tough times together. * * * Three Billboards outside Ebbing[…]
Actors & Personalities · Colonialism · Drama · Essays · Historical & Epic · Philosophy · Religion & Spirituality · Writers & Critics
Near the close of our Skype meeting, my conversation with James Fox turned inside out. He enquired if he could ask me a question. He then tried to assemble the[…]
Trauma can plant its seed-bomb in the minefield of a vulnerable mind, a risk every participant in war takes, and one the film addresses in several contexts. For the viewer,[…]
Activist & Political · Biopic · Documentaries · Drama · Eastern European · Middle East
Like Assayas’s Carlos, Ujică’s Autobiography mostly remains an investigation of a public figure in its public functions. And both films subtly decenter their Big Man of History protagonists. Both document[…]
African American · Drama · LGBT & Queer · Sex & Relationships
The visual style shows people as essentially solitary, a remarkable choice of perspective in view of the importance of the wider social realities – racial and sexual – that “create”[…]
French Cinema · Literature and Film · Philosophy · Writers & Critics
Tout le film est en effet l’histoire d’une persuasion. (The whole film is the story of a persuasion.) – Alain Robbe-Grillet1 En fait, je pense qu’on a tout à fait[…]
Within this tightly composed spiral of compounding blackmail, which implicates a high-ranking South American diplomat and resembles the byzantine schemes in Merry-Go-Round, de Gregorio catalogues a litany of sins: lust,[…]
Over the last few decades, however, Native women have begun to appear in multidimensional roles that not only take place in contemporary society but whose characters are pivotal to the[…]
African American · Animation · Franchises & Series · Sports
The implication is that fun is what is ultimately being played for – that fun is freedom’s goal, the reason that liberty is desirable at all. Michael knows that if[…]
Activist & Political · African American · Essays · Historical & Epic · Silents
D. W. Griffith died on July 23, 1948. To commemorate this seminal figure in cinema history, we repost BLFJ regular Gordon Thomas’s deep dive, which first appeared in 2016, into[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Drama
You would never guess either from looking at him or from the “aw shucks” way in which he’s remembered that Stewart is responsible for some of the most erotic romantic[…]
Essays · Hollywood · Literature and Film · Westerns
There is almost certainly nowhere in America, probably even the Western world, as infamous for its venality and ambiguities than Didion’s home for three decades: Hollywood, Los Angeles. In Once[…]
Actors & Personalities · Women in Film
“[Vivien Leigh] is, I should say, the most important recruit British films have ever had . . . She is still not at all keen on going to Hollywood. She could go any day if she said the word. It’s up to the English studios to develop her over here.” — Picturegoer, April 3, 1937
African · Colonialism · Education · Literature and Film · Women in Film
Much of the affective force of Palcy’s film closely resembles and draws on the deep emotional involvement Truffaut leads his audience to invest in the vulnerable, yearning ne’er-do-well Antoine Doinel.[…]
Biopic · Drama · Writers & Critics
In both texts, these strategies suggest similar attempts to represent the present moment’s relationship to the American past. Faulkner’s devastating analysis of race and Welles’s meditations on wealth and worth[…]
Drama · Military and Paramilitary · Philosophy · Thrillers & Action · Urban Conflict · War
This essay discusses Eye in the Sky’s elaborate staging of the trolley problem, a famous philsophical thought experiment designed to tease out our criteria for moral judgments. The author argues[…]
Each Abel-Gordon-Romy scenario is like a test, or challenge – in heroic terms, a trial – the filmmakers put to themselves, culminating in the couple going it alone for Lost[…]
Books · Experimental & Underground · Philosophy
It is, ostensibly, a story about a truck. The 32-ton Saviem truck of Marguerite Duras’ 1977 experimental film Le Camion moves relentlessly forward, steered by a faceless driver, to an[…]
Classical · Historical & Epic · TV & Streaming
What haunts me in the story of Nero is the mercurial nature of art and fiction. They are good for us only so far as they encourage our well-being. Human[…]
