A Good Game of Chess: Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2015)
“Ava was a rat in a maze, and I gave her one way out. To escape, she’d have to use self-awareness, imagination, manipulation, sexuality, empathy, and she did.” * *[…]
Category: Genres
Activist & Political · Counterculture · Essays
All the World’s a Stage and Every Revolutionary a Commodity: Network and Its Progeny
The challenge is to convince the suits who kept recycling dramas about state-legitimized violence to get on board with the notion that counterculture or revolutionary violence can also sell. When[…]
A Regular Film: Deluded or Clear-sighted? (When artist and critic are one)
Regular or otherwise, interesting films famously have the power to take us inside other people’s heads. * * * In the 2014 film Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter, director/co-writer David Zellner[…]
Asian · Directors · Historical & Epic · Interviews
“A Different Space and Time”: Hou Hsiao-Hsien on The Assassin (2015)
Hou on The Assassin: I don’t believe we should blindly obey masters. Nie Yinniang is ordered by her master Jiaxin (Sheu Fang-yi) to kill a high-ranking official, but – once[…]
“A much more thoughtful and (is it possible?) more mature director”: Woody Allen at Eighty
Years from now, there will be little question as to his place in film history – a prominent seat at the grownups’ table, with a place card highlighting his run[…]
Crime · LGBT & Queer · Writers & Critics
The Complex Art of Murder: The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)
Someday someone will tease apart the many layers of Damon’s performance: the charming Ripley, the frightened Ripley, the exposed Ripley, his voice subtly betraying him even as face remains serene.[…]
Sh! The Horror! 13 Suggestions for an Uncommon Halloween Viewing Experience
Editor’s note: We’re posting Erich “Mr. Acidemic” Kuersten’s viewing guide a couple of days before Halloween to give our readers a chance to locate these “cool and strange” suggestions spanning cinema’s[…]
The Horror of Depersonalisation: Lav Diaz’s Norte, Baudrillard, and the End of History
Fabian’s self-destructive peregrination, the ordeal he has imposed on himself through others – from the double murder, to the rape of his sister, to the slaying of his once beloved[…]
Books · Drama · DVD & Blu-ray
“Secret Energy and Vital Intelligence”: On Karel Reisz’s Adaptation of The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981)
What’s remarkable, in both book and film, is how the metafictional elements do not detract from our emotional investment in the straightforward fiction. Where Fowles’ interjected commentary and authorial intrusions form[…]
Ti West Is Pregnant (On the Low-Budget Auteur of The Roost, The Innkeepers, and House of the Devil)
A reluctant genre force who admits his pictures start out as regular films but turn into horror movies much the same way he describes the process of filmmaking itself as[…]
Spider Eats Butterfly: Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961)
The film makes a far more subtle statement about childhood’s inevitable, metaphorical death: All innocent children must eventually grow into corrupted adults, and adults will only suffer for trying to[…]
Actors & Personalities · Silents
Beautiful Dead Girl: On Early Hollywood Casualty Olive Thomas (Oct. 20, 1894-Sept. 10, 1920) and The Olive Thomas Collection on DVD
Note: Gordon Thomas’s review of the DVD set The Olive Thomas Collection, first published on November 1, 2005, is also a provocative profile of one of Hollywood’s most fascinating early scandals/tragedies. To[…]
Activist & Political · Essays · War
Innocents Abroad: Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper (2014)
American Sniper becomes neither a post-ideological assertion of the nobility of the soldier forced to reflect on his own beliefs, nor a latter-day western investigating the presence of violence at[…]
Technology and Transcendence: On Joshua Gen Solondz’s Prisoner’s Cinema (2012)
The duplicity of hallucination/sight and transcendence/imprisonment is essential to the meaning: flicker cinema breaks the normal illusion of cinema – movement – replacing it with the audience’s self-consciousness of their[…]
SF & Fantasy · Thrillers & Action
He’s Back: The Paratextual Life of Terminator: Genisys
The movie makes a half-hearted attempt at chastising contemporary society and its dependence on technology, on machines (ironically, Sarah would not have survived without the help of a machine). Everyone[…]
Lone Rangers: Using Terror to Publicize “Revolution”
From the margins, both a “crazy man” and visionary artists can ask: How can leaders govern when language has been debased and words no longer have true meaning? * *[…]
Into the Deep: Reflections on Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013)
The dominant image from Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013) is that of an opaque pool of black liquid, into which sink a variety of men who have fallen victim[…]
Recent DVD and Blu-ray Releases from Flicker Alley: The House of Mystery, Dziga Vertov, Joan the Woman, The Marriage Circle
The House of Mystery (Volkoff, 1921-23), Dziga Vertov: The Man with the Movie Camera and Other Restored Works (Vertov, 1924-1934), Joan the Woman (DeMille, 1916), and The Marriage Circle (Lubitsch,[…]
Notes on a Stupid Dinosaur Movie: Jurassic World and the Hollywood Blockbuster
Once a film gives up on originality, it immediately descends into nihilism. Whatever sensory pleasures such a film may offer, the underlying assumption is that the entire experience is empty[…]
Drama · Essays · Writers & Critics
Film: An Adaptive Species. Part 1 of 2: Between a Book and a Hard Place
Lincoln (2012) & Wolf Hall (2015)/Les Miserables (1933) & Great Expectations (1946/2012) * * * So, notwithstanding humanist art or realistic biography, we go on hurting each other. “Everybody hurts,” as[…]
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