The Line, The Eye: Yves Saint Laurent on Film
Mesmerizing designs pull our eyes away from the tiresome demands of history, but Bonello doesn’t portray Yves as an escapist. Instead, he suggests that we cannot assume a straightforward relation[…]
Category: Genres
The Plot Genre Revolution: Or, Why the Western Isn’t a Genre
Fortunately for those of us who like distinct and finite categories, the number of plot genres is limited in this formulation by the narrow scope of human desires: find love,[…]
Directors · Interviews · Middle East
Iranian Independent Cinema, Its Challenges and Future: An Interview with Abdolreza Kahani
I have made films both in Iran and France, so I know the conditions. In France, when funding is given, there are no strings attached to it. You are free[…]
Weary Shadow: Considering The Conformist (Bertolucci, 1970)
What’s in the bag is Marcello Clerici, and the bag, not surprisingly, is empty. * * * Upon its release in 1970, how many of us were prepared for The[…]
Historical & Epic · Producers & Studios · War
“War Brings Out What People Really Are”: Hell’s Angels Reconsidered
Introduction Hell’s Angels, Howard Hughes’s 1930 film, was praised for its aerial photography and derided for its story. “War Brings Out What People Really Are” surveys critical films Hollywood produced[…]
Activist & Political · Directors · Interviews
“The World of the Road Is a State of Exception”: Boris Lojkine’s Hope Explores the World of African Migrants
Hope is the title, half ironic, half resolutely sincere, of a stunning film about African migrants trekking across a continent’s most forbidding landscapes to reach the promised land of Europe.[…]
52 Shades of Gone: Gone, Goner, Gone-est Girl
Every failure, every road not taken is a Gone Girl all its own, Regular Amy’s story a machine for the draining away of these idealizations till she and we are[…]
A Woman of Paris: She’s a (Universal) Artist, and She Don’t Look Back
Suddenly the whole medium grew up before my eyes . . . a grown-up film, with people behaving as they do in real life . . . . Nobody had ever[…]
Documentaries · Experimental & Underground · Historical & Epic · Reviews
“Hundreds of Thousands of Hours of Moments”: On Adam Curtis’s Bitter Lake (2015)
In a recent interview, the English filmmaker Adam Curtis described finding “hidden levels in the BBC archive” where a vast collection of extraneous footage has been accumulating over the last[…]
Directors · Documentaries · Experimental & Underground · War
Re-envisioning the Postwar Documentary: Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog and Hiroshima mon amour
Despite the reputation that Alain Resnais has garnered as “cinema’s definitive artist of postwar trauma,” few scholars have undertaken a detailed comparative analysis of his two works that broach this[…]
The End of History in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive
Adam, a vampire and underground rock musician, sneaks down the quiet corridors of a Detroit hospital, dressed in a physician’s scrubs with his face concealed by a surgical mask and[…]
Activist & Political · Actors & Personalities · War
The Shame Is on the Aggressor: The Image of Rape in Films About Bosnia and in the Films of Angelina Jolie
Angelina Jolie may be among our best hopes to end the cruel and vile practice of mass rape in conflict. She has a bully pulpit as a rich and famous[…]
Jean-Pierre Melville’s Noir Improvisations: Two Men in Manhattan, Le Doulos, Le Deuxieme Souffle
First daring and experimental in an era of conformity, then classical in the age of the new wave, and finally nuanced and introspective when fashionable tastes ran radical and revolutionary[…]
Dreams and Visions: Ingmar Bergman’s Kvinnodröm (Dreams) (1955)
A self-confessed conjurer, Bergman’s films are tricky in every sense. What makes these movies so difficult is what makes life itself difficult – the overwhelming desire to know the unknowable,[…]
Rosetta: Learning to See
Now she is finally able to “see” him back, to acknowledge the impact of her actions on another who cares for her, to accept their mutual obligations, and to entertain[…]
Drama · LGBT & Queer · New Media
Bringing Ira Sachs’ Love Is Strange into Focus
“Let us try to focus all our energy and all of our love on these two men, George and Ben.” “Always, always, you must focus on the instrument you are[…]
Directors · Drama · Reviews · Writers & Critics
Peace Out and Fuck You: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice
That Anderson chose to adhere so closely to the novel indicates a lack of desire to transform or elevate the work, and, regardless of whether or not this was motivated[…]
Essays · New Media · SF & Fantasy · Writers & Critics
Spike Jonze vs. the Conspiring Escapist: On Her, Robert Coover’s Universal Baseball Association, and Jan Švankmajer’s Conspirators of Pleasure
“What Jonze, Coover, and Švankmajer are all playing with in their distinctive, varying shades of dark humor are the dual perspectives of the Spielbergian audience, absorbed in the protagonists’ fantasies,[…]
DVD & Blu-ray · Experimental & Underground
Dread Mechanics: The Sublime Terror of Bill Morrison’s Decasia (2002)
Decasia is a “horror film” in which the horror it presents as the corruption imposed by time on what people create is also an unavoidable part of the world we[…]
The Return of Repression: How Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook Undoes Itself
The Babadook presents a normative vision of what it believes is a stable, happy existence, one in which if our emotions are difficult to bear, we simply lock them in[…]
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