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
“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[…]
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
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[…]
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[…]
“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.” * *[…]
Activist & Political · Counterculture · Essays
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[…]
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
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[…]
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
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.[…]
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[…]
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
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[…]
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[…]
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
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
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[…]
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
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[…]
