Designers · Horror · Interviews
“We need guilt, Doctor. And shame.” * * * Luca Guadagnino follows up 2016’s A Bigger Splash and 2017’s Call Me by Your Name with 2018’s Suspiria, a remake of[…]
In Sparrow, this sense of melancholia manifests as an abstract nostalgia for the architecture and cultural values of an old Hong Kong that is rapidly disappearing and being replaced by[…]
This brief essay will seek to answer the distinctions between mimetic and diegetic elements in a filmic text, isolate the voice-over as a unique event located between the strict division[…]
“All the things we should’ve said that I never said/ All the things we should’ve done that we never did/ All the things we should’ve given but I didn’t/ Oh,[…]
Horror · Women in Film · Writers & Critics
Despite the fact that Wray had no previous screen credits, Lewton hired her to rework the story of I Walked with a Zombie with only two months to go before[…]
“The aesthetic features of post-horror replicate the mixture of shame, confusion, shock, and anxiety about the future experienced by liberal Americans in the midst of the Tea Party and Trump’s[…]
The characters’ fates are determined more by chance than by anything else, so pursuing justice in Unforgiven is about as futile as fighting an organized battle in Good Bad Ugly.[…]
It’s OK with Me: Hollywood, the 1970s, and the Return of the Private Eye, by Jason Bailey. $11.99, 78 pp. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2018. Across individual analysis of about[…]
Directors · Documentaries · Essays
I think that this delicate line between reality, and fact, and truth needs to be more clearly defined. We have to redefine reality.1 – Werner Herzog There are dignified stupidities.[…]
Comedy · Counterculture · Drama
Everyone in Shampoo is id driven, with the audience taking voyeuristic pleasure at the absence of any self-awareness. George is inarticulate and largely passive, more preyed upon than preying with[…]
The Prince: “I haven’t yet had a report from your office. What’s your work like?” The Warden: “Every night the same. Every night till the heart beats as if it[…]
Festivals & Awards · Women in Film
Rather than a fascist leader, in Vox Lux Celeste suggests a different sort of monstrosity – a receptacle for the nation’s horrors and fantasies, even more than a Madonna or a[…]
Some actors’ gestures are the equivalent of a great singer, dancer, or athlete achieving the heights of their profession. And the reason so many people respond to Ford’s films by[…]
Theirs is a passive outlook, young men products of a culture that for too many generations has grown to depend on a corporate entity, mistaking the mill for a permanent,[…]
The demon-summoning, LED laser-lens flares, medieval weaponry-fetishizing, churning synth and axe rhythms, and the overall simmer of curdling darkness are collective flickers of a recurrent, suffocatingly inescapable nightmare, one fueled[…]
Festivals & Awards · New Media
Francis Ford Coppola introduced the screening of his Robin Williams vehicle Jack. Since this was the Festival of Disruption, Coppola said he wanted to “disrupt” by screening his worst film,[…]
Mia: It feels really nostalgic to me. Sebastian: That’s the point. Mia: Are people going to like it? Sebastian: Fuck ’em. – La La Land * * * The popular[…]
Costume Drama · Literature and Film
The otherwise remarkably faithful adaptation, however, makes an incongruent turn when Scorsese reverses Wharton’s color casting of the two female protagonists by portraying Ellen Olenska and May Welland as blonde[…]
Activist & Political · African American · Counterculture
The stealthy campaign of subterfuge undertaken by Stallworth is only one possible stance of resistance. And in adopting such a form of civil disobedience, Stallworth aligns himself with a cultural[…]
Absurdism · Activist & Political · Philosophy
The film’s most problematic allegorical turn, however, is its subsequent and wholesale appropriation of Palestinian trauma. Despite the slaughter of four innocent Palestinians – by accident or not – Maoz[…]
