Documentaries · Festivals & Awards
“I’m grateful I didn’t grow up with Barbie.” – Gloria Steinem * * * Gloria Steinem isn’t alone. Lisa Simpson hates Barbie. Feminist writer Roxanne Gay wishes Barbie had never[…]
I don’t like these three guys in this coffee shop either. I can’t help but compare them to the Ghostbox opportunists who were written to be disliked. That much –[…]
Comedy · Documentaries · Festivals & Awards
The effect is intimate, but not particularly enlightening. Love, Gilda offers a lot of reminiscing, some sweet (and a few heavy) insights, but very little new information about Radner’s life.[…]
Unassimilated weirdness is typical of Popeye – even in its soundtrack, where goofy “boing” effects are used to accompany ordinary, unheroic movement. Sweethaven’s anthem, the Harry Nilsson song “Everything Is[…]
Covering topics as banal as the production of plastics and as profound as cultural appropriation, these films aren’t workaday projects so much as serious visual essays that extend Resnais’ preoccupation[…]
Drama · SF & Fantasy · Women in Film
Even as it has sunk like a stone commercially, Annihilation has drawn a flurry of passionate responses, mainly, it seems, from women writers. Many single out its admixture of beauty[…]
Designers · Drama · Women in Film
This is the second of two pieces on Phantom Thread. See Sam Ankenbauer’s different take in the previous post. * * * The articulation of female pleasure in The Phantom[…]
Note: This is the first of two reviews of Phantom Thread. Watch for Raymond De Luca’s take later this week. Each viewing paints old interactions in new colors, and the film thrives[…]
“There are no waves, there is only the ocean.” – Claude Chabrol * * * From 1968 to 1975 Claude Chabrol directed a dozen films – one of the most[…]
Directors · Horror · SF & Fantasy
“It’s better to be a human being than an imitation.”- John Carpenter, on The Thing * * * 1. Begin with sound. Begin with Assault on Precinct 13 (1976). A[…]
The internal structure of Lady Bird is, I think, unconsciously designed to evoke the monster mother and then deflect the daughterly hostility she provokes by turning things around to insist,[…]
African · African American · Comics · Franchises & Series · SF/Fantasy
The media’s insistence on making more of the film than a big, enjoyably dumb action movie only highlights the drastic shift in representation in casting and marketing as a predatory[…]
African · Experimental & Underground · New Media · Video Artists
We might presume the temporal slips at stake in an African video exhibit are squarely political or anticolonial, but the videos’ slow, reverse, and repeated motions also link politico-economic disorder[…]
Designers · Interviews · LGBT & Queer
Call Me by Your Name was nominated for four Academy Awards this year, including Best Picture, Best Lead Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Original Song. In this interview, production designer[…]
Directors · Essays · Philosophy
“Mystery is good, confusion is bad. And there’s a big difference between the two.” – David Lynch * * * A survey of the critical literature pertaining to David Lynch’s[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy
The Brothers don’t enter into sanctimonious class systems, organizational institutions, or drawing rooms to assimilate and enjoy the fruits of its privileges either; they gain access, enact a savage modus[…]
But the choice to get this thing out of her body, to have an abortion, is made up of equal parts self-compassion and safety. It is entirely locatable. Ronnie is[…]
Animation · Designers · Fashion
Disney’s Cinderella was released on this day, February 15, in 1950. We celebrate her “birth” by reposting Emanuele Lugli’s witty tribute/takedown of Cinderella via her – and the period’s –[…]
Drugs · Military and Paramilitary · Thrillers & Action · Urban Conflict · War
“In the company of wolves was a stretcher made of cobblestone curfews as the federales performed their custodial customs quite well.” – At the Drive In * * * In[…]
Blade Runner 2049 resists our contemporary moment of political and cultural polarization that exploits difference as a cudgel to reinforce (inevitably racialized) hostilities. The film instead forwards a vision of[…]
