The Black Rose in the Garden: A Second Look at The Babadook
Amelia has cultivated a fearful respect of Mr. Babadook. She is in control of him and feeds him worms from her garden. Instead of trying to exorcise the demon, she[…]
Category: Genres
Directors · Documentaries · Experimental & Underground · Exploitation & Erotica · Memoir · Outsiders
Obscene and Obscure Longings: The Video Diaries of George Kuchar and Carl J. Sukenick
As much as there remains some graspable appeal to each man’s video work – George’s comic personality and the humorous reckoning with his own legacy, and Carl’s peculiar brand of[…]
Actors & Personalities · Asian
“From Slumdog to Heartthrob”: Dev Patel’s Journey in Hollywood So Far
The next step for a Hollywood that is coming to see the true potential of Dev Patel’s abilities is to let him shine in his own right, and in his[…]
Activist & Political · Animals · Drama
Twenty-Five Years Later, Babe Is More Relevant Than Ever
Although Babe was released a quarter-century ago, its critique of animal agriculture remains timely. Babe celebrates the “unprejudiced heart” of its eponymous piggy hero, who narrowly escapes becoming Christmas dinner[…]
Books · Noir · Uncategorized
Books: John Alton: Essays on the Cinematographer’s Art and Craft
Leon Lewis (Ed.), John Alton: Essays on the Cinematographer’s Art and Craft (McFarland, 2020) * * * Widely regarded as epitomizing the visual style of high film noir as it[…]
Actors & Personalities · Asian
Japanese Cinema’s Uncommon Man: Tatsuya Nakadai’s Dissidents, Outcasts, and Shadow Warriors
“Like Hollywood’s new postwar men, he offered a multifaceted, ambivalent masculinity far from monolithic wartime ideals.”
Father’s Fine, Grandma Too: And When You Fall Down, So Are You (On Mandy, Dance Little Lady, and The Farewell)
In fact, until the appearance of this relatively unsung Russian actress, all of the above might easily have remained permanently stuck at the level of “stodgy melodrama.” Instead, we suddenly[…]
Dreams and the Human Material in Night of the Living Dead
Dawn brings the forces of reason and order (ironic, in that the posse clearing away the few remaining dead are little more than trigger-happy, thrill-seeking rednecks, not the wise and[…]
Activist & Political · African American · Societal Trends
A Star Is Shorn: Thanks to Woefully Underinformed Campus Activists, Acting Legend, Badger Alum, and Civil Rights Champion Fredric March Is Suddenly “Off Wisconsin”
Fredric March stands alongside four other mid-century drum majors for civil rights during the 1943 national radio broadcast of “Race-Relations Sunday.” Left to right: concert soprano Dorothy Maynor, actor Canada[…]
Actors & Personalities · Books · Characters · Hollywood
Books: Celeste Holm Syndrome: On Character Actors from Hollywood’s Golden Age, by David Lazar
David Lazar, Celeste Holm Syndrome: On Character Actors from Hollywood’s Golden Age (Omaha: University of Nebraska Press, October 2020) * * * I’d have to say that the best definition[…]
Activist & Political · Hollywood · Teaching · War · Women in Film
Ingeworthy: Teaching William Inge in Kabul
It is in the American women’s picture that, in my classroom at the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul, I’m able to lead students in a global reading of women’s[…]
Drama · Theory · Writers & Critics
André Bazin and Graham Greene (and Alfred Hitchcock): Some Points of Contact
Bazin would always harbor reservations about The Third Man, but, due to that film, Greene’s presence would continue to loom large in discussions of Orson Welles, who was, of course,[…]
Books: The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood
Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood (New York: Flatiron Books, 2020). * * * Sam Wasson’s The Big Goodbye tells the irresistible tale of[…]
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[…]
Books · Directors · Documentaries · Experimental & Underground · Women in Film
Her Incantatory Voice: Barbara Rubin and Christmas on Earth
From the same desert, toward the same dark sky, my tired eyes open on the silver star, forever; but the Three Wise Men never stir, the Kings of life, the[…]
Experimental & Underground · Horror · Memoir
Strangest Damn Things: Eraserhead in My Head
Our Eraserhead screening was naïve and unexpected and for me had lasting impact, because when art enters our heads uninvited, leaves traces after it’s flashed through our consciousness, jars the[…]
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[…]
Directors · Experimental & Underground · Memoir
Adagio: Phil Solomon on His Life as an Artist
“I’ve always been interested in the idea of cinema and loss, the beautiful and poignant conjuring of human presence and its absence. It’s an illusion, we know that, and yet[…]
Born on a Meat Hook: On André Øvredal’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019)
“We grow up, but do we ever forget how afraid of ourselves we are?” * * * The books parents protest about are the best at converting children into bookworms.[…]
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[…]
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