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.”
Category: Genres
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[…]
Activist & Political · African American · Cinematographers · Interviews · War
The Greater Symphony: Talking with Cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel about Da 5 Bloods
When I take on a project, one of the first things I try to do is get an idea of the overarching tone the director is looking for. Then I[…]
New Genres · New Media · Travel
From Bergen to Oslo and Beyond: All Aboard the Slow TV Train
Yet if Slow TV is concerned with capturing movement, which is actually quite fast during the journey, why then is it also slow? The slowness is in the pace and[…]
Doing Favors: The Insular Moral and Political World of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman
The restrained tone, middle American location, and half-century historical sweep of The Irishman depart from Scorsese’s gangland epics Goodfellas and Casino. It isn’t a political treatise, but it does tie[…]
The Big Sigh: Exploring the Lost Continent of Classic French Film Noir 1932-1966
Expanding and redrawing Ginette Vincendeau’s incomplete map of French film noir * * * Let it be said here first: I come to praise Ginette Vincendeau,1 not to bury her.[…]
“Who is the third who walks always beside you?” Carol Reed, Graham Greene, and The Third Man
If Harry, viewed through the lens of Greene’s perverse Catholicism, is some kind of dark Jesus, then Holly is his betraying Judas, and Anna is his Magdalene. Both Harry and[…]
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