La La Land and Dreams of a Musical Renaissance
There is some originality in this orgy of borrowing, with easy references to touch screens, cell phones, and an interracial marriage, but all with a constant backward orientation. La La[…]
Category: Genres
Jerry Lewis and the Gender of Work
The gender of work in the work films is a spectrum that includes both the neutered worker of The Bellboy and The Errand Boy and the feminized worker of Cinderfella,[…]
Biopic · Historical & Epic · War
“What a Fine Ruin It’ll Make!”: John Ford’s The Long Gray Line (1954)
Repeatedly, the tragedies in Marty’s life lead him to question the worth of life, and repeatedly the order and stability of the parade re-enters to ease his mind, allowing him[…]
In Search of Lost Time: A Review of Mike Mills’ 20th Century Women
The whole film can be viewed as a consciousness-raising of sorts. While even new-wave French auteurs fall into predictable madeleine-inspired memory spirals riffing on (not to put too fine a point[…]
Activist & Political · Biopic · Essays
The Cowboy’s Final Act: On Clint Eastwood, Trump, American Sniper, and Sully
These films aren’t merely exercises in cinematic glorification – like Clint Eastwood’s speech, they are a part of a uniquely American myth-making process, posing straw-man moral tests for their protagonists[…]
Activist & Political · Animation
The Hole in Moana’s Heart
What the movie gets wrong is at the story’s heart: not the goddess Te Fiti’s, but the human heart. People, not gods, were the cause of environmental devastation on Pacific[…]
What Makes Them So Successful? A Look into the Philosophy Behind the Coens’ Filmography
The truth is that they tend toward philosophical absurdism, rather than nihilism, and this perspective is what either makes or breaks their film in terms of commercial appeal. The draw,[…]
Activist & Political · Asian · Directors · Interviews
Challenging the Censor: An Interview with Indian Political Documentarian Rakesh Sharma
“India has always assigned a special sort of power to film . . . an extraordinary power to corrupt gullible masses has been given to cinema.” – Rakesh Sharma *[…]
Activist & Political · Books · Horror
Book Review: Films of the New French Extremity: Visceral Horror and National Identity
By the mid-2000s, following social unrest and political upheaval in France, and culminating with the emergence of the “torture-porn” horror subgenre in the United States with titles such as Saw[…]
Activist & Political · Crime · Essays
Lords of Nothing: Hell or High Water (2016)
“Hey, buddy. We’re exactly the same. What’s happening to these people happened to my ancestors, and it happened to your ancestors.” – Alberto to Marcus in Hell or High Water,[…]
Directors · Film Technology & History · SF & Fantasy
George Lucas’s Wildest Vision: Retrofuturist Auteurism in Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002)
The very foundation of Lucas’s cinematic philosophy is newness – this comes through in his obsession with technological possibilities, and through his genuinely childlike pursuit of spectacle and wonder. His[…]
The Crazy World of His Girl Friday (1940)
His Girl Friday’s headlong pace feels like that of modern life, and its rapid-fire, overlapping dialogue calls to mind our modern media babble, with innumerable people around the globe and[…]
African · Experimental & Underground
Waiting for Cinema: Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Naked Reality (2016)
Bekolo’s cinema is not just “African,” or postcolonial, or experimental, or narrative. It is also a cinema that constantly searches for itself, for what it is and what it can accomplish.[…]
Experimental & Underground · Festivals & Awards
Making Waves: Wavelengths at the Toronto International Film Festival (September 8-18, 2016)
With so many films being made – many of which will never receive wide distribution – how do you navigate the glut of movies at a whopper like Toronto? *[…]
Essays · Horror · Religion & Spirituality
You Say You Want a Revolution? Regan’s Head and The Exorcist
If the evil spirit is “seen,” that is, reflected . . . he is overcome. – Marie-Louise von Franz Unmask Satan, and you vanquish him. – St. Augustine * *[…]
The Propagation of Empathy, the Absence of Bathos: On Alexander Payne’s Sideways (2004)
Regret is perhaps Payne’s greatest theme. The continual human dramedy, the elegiac comedy, a country full of people with limited potential raised to think everyone is special, confined souls struggling[…]
A Legacy of Hope: Andrzej Wajda, 1926-2016
He studied and documented his country’s history, politics, and national myths in both film and theater, and was a beloved mentor to countless young filmmakers. * * * Andrzej Wajda[…]
Experimenting with the Horrific: A Reappraisal and Retrospective of the Films of Tobe Hooper
Hooper’s interest in horror articulates itself primarily in formal invention: how can the frame be used to incapacitate viewer expectations? * * * Tobe Hooper’s most recent feature film, Djinn[…]
African American · Crime · Documentaries
Black Lives Matter: Whitewashing the Amanda Knox Story in the Netflix Documentary
By ignoring the black lives involved, the new Netflix documentary Amanda Knox (premiering on Netflix on September 30) is not only a very white film, it ends up producing its own miscarriage of[…]
The Trouble with Scottie (on Vertigo)
I have yet to encounter anybody who feels my fierce outrage at Scottie’s unfairness toward the necklace. That object is all-important, not because it is the vital clue to the Madeleine-is-Judy[…]
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