Drama · Memoir · Philosophy
After Love: Alan J. Pakula’s The Sterile Cuckoo
FROM CABIN C AT OUDIN’S COURT COTTAGES I just awoke, and wondered where you were. It was the strangest feeling, like I really expected you to be there. Eventually my[…]
Category: Genres
Book Review: Cycles, Sequels, Spin-offs, Remakes, and Reboots, edited by Amanda Ann Klein and R. Barton Palmer
Cycles, Sequels, Spin-offs, Remakes, and Reboots: Multiplicities in Film and Television, Edited by Amanda Ann Klein and R. Barton Palmer (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016, 367pp, $29.95 from the[…]
“When Does a Difference-Engine Become a Search for Truth?” Cybernetic Platonism in Alex Proyas’ I, Robot (2004)
Sonny says that now that he has completed the mission for which he was created – to kill Dr. Lanning – he does not know what to do with himself,[…]
Why Didn’t You Tell Me That I Love You? Asexuality, Polymorphous Perversity, and the Liberation of the Cinematic Clown
The happy ending that sees the clown coupled with the girl never satisfies precisely because we know the clown’s appropriate place is one of “in-between-ness,” a position that stands in[…]
Activist & Political · Directors · Documentaries · Interviews
Berlinale Dispatch #1: Gianfranco Rosi Talks About Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare) (2016)
Editor’s note: This is the first of two interviews (next up: Nanni Moretti) our correspondent Amir Ganjavie conducted with directors at the 2016 Berlin Film Festival (Feb. 11-21). Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire[…]
A Mindscape of Mirrors: Persona and the Cinema of Self-Perception
Like Sylvia Plath’s mirror, which promises then imperils her ideal self, the gaze of the other in Persona is a double-edged sword: a threat to pure subjectivity but also the[…]
Activist & Political · Crime · Historical & Epic · War
Rethinking Historical Responsibility Through Art: The Role of Film in Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012)
The killers were more than willing to help and, when we filmed them boastfully describing their crimes against humanity, we met no resistance whatsoever. All doors were open. Local police[…]
Activist & Political · African American · Animation
“Yeah, but look how far we’ve come”: Disney and the Depiction of Blackness in The Princess and the Frog
Is it inconceivable that instead of taking on the forces of the underworld, the title character, Princess Tiana, do battle with the very real racist prejudice and legal injustice that[…]
Comedy · Directors · Historical & Epic · LGBT & Queer
Camping Out in Hollywood: The Coen Brothers’ Hail, Caesar!
Hail, Caesar! is not one of the Coens’ better films, but, because of its grab-bag of Hollywood silliness, it is perhaps the best at illuminating one of the main reasons[…]
The Last Man on Earth: Drama of a Lifeless Ordinary
“… the living being is only a species of the dead.” – Nietzsche * * * Dead Man. Dead Man’s Curve. Dead Man on Campus. Dead Man Walking (1988). Dead[…]
Death and Rebirth: Revisiting Ryszard Bugajski’s Masterpiece Interrogation (Poland, 1982)
One member of the meeting, Bohdan Poremba, called Interrogation a “premeditated lie” and, in perhaps the strangest criticism of the film, expressed his disappointment that it only showed a few[…]
Jurassic Parks: Stevie and the Dinosaurs
Spielberg, like many film directors, appears to be far more interested in film than life – interested in film, and interested in audiences, and how to move them through film.[…]
Directors · Documentaries · Silents
Nanook and Robert Flaherty: Father of Documentary Film – and More
Robert Flaherty and Alice Nevalinga (aka Nyla, the smiling one) were romantically involved – or as McLane modestly puts it, “he had an Eskimo female companion.” * * * In[…]
Counterculture · Documentaries · DVD & Blu-ray · Music & Musicals
Take What You Have Gathered from Coincidence: D. A. Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back (1967)
“BOB: Well, you always know who you are. I just don’t know who I’m gonna become.” – Sam Shepard. True Dylan: A One-Act Play as It Really Happened One Afternoon in[…]
Essays · Experimental & Underground · SF & Fantasy · Writers & Critics
Time and the Image: The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes
These things never happen but are always. – Sallust The dead love the most, love the longest. – Malvina von Stille * * * INTRODUCTORY Centuries of thought and imagination,[…]
Dramas of Morality and Corruption: Sidney Lumet’s Police Quartet – Serpico, Prince of the City, Q&A, Night Falls on Manhattan
Taken as a quartet, these films shift from lauding the exposure of police corruption to struggling futilely against its pervasiveness. In Serpico and to a lesser extent Prince of the[…]
African American · Essays · Historical & Epic · Westerns
The Hateful Eight: History’s Dark Bounty
“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will[…]
Mexican Roadtrips: Güeros, Sicaros, and the Search for Mexico
Güeros is the story of a search without an object, and it offers an approach to making political art that dwells not in the illusion of authenticity, but in the[…]
Historical & Epic · SF & Fantasy
Star Wars: The Force Awakens: An Archetypal Review
Critics and fans love the film, but complain that it is less “mythic” than its predecessors. The myth is still there; it is just harder to see because it is[…]
Synthetic Mythology: George Lucas, Disney, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens
The marriage of Disney and Lucasfilm is a match made in heaven. Disney – the man and the company – spent the better part of a century trying to homogenize[…]
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