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[…]
Category: Genres
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[…]
What It Says About The New Republic If They Don’t Understand Horror Films
The continuing attention being showered on Jennifer Kent’s 2014 The Babadook from horror luminaries such as Stephen King and William Friedkin has prompted some impressive critical writing, while simultaneously anchoring[…]
“I Never Felt So Much Like Christmas in All My Life”: Why You Should Make a Date with The Man Who Came to Dinner
Sometimes, the personal angle offers the clearest view. Now and then, the authorial “we” must be abandoned in favour of a more open-handed, first-person approach. Therefore, I’ll begin by saying[…]
Home Is Not Just for Christmas … or Thanksgiving … or Middle-Class Chaps, However Decent
To be clear, The Holly and the Ivy is not mistakable for a lost gem from Renoir or Mizoguchi. Yet it does make the most of a story told “in[…]
Directors · Film Technology & History · Historical & Epic · Pre-Code · Religion & Spirituality · Silents
The Wickedest Movie in the World: How Cecil B. DeMille Made The Sign of the Cross
This post was adapted from the new book by Cecilia de Mille Presley and Mark A. Vieira, Cecil B. DeMille: The Art of the Hollywood Epic (Running Press, 416pp, December[…]
Activist & Political · African American · Directors · Reviews
Radio Raheem Is a Broken Record: Lessons from Do the Right Thing on Its 25th Anniversary
“Do the Right Thing ends the morning after Radio Raheem’s death, but we have enough details to know how the rest of the narrative will play out. Radio Raheem was[…]
Essays · Experimental & Underground · Silents · Sound & Language
Tomatoes Another Day: The Improbable Ideological Subversion of James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber
“Though standard critical appraisals would deem Tomatoes a deliberately crude affront to modern technical sophistication, it is itself the sophisticated artifact, its small rebellion resonating more strongly in a media[…]
Comedy · Crime · Sound & Language
Sound, Music, and the Verbal MacGuffin in American Hustle (2013)
American Hustle is, foremost, a film about appearances, about what is real and the constant dialogue between the diegetic and the extra-diegetic, which is especially compelling at the level of[…]
Directors · Exploitation & Erotica
Pure Auteurness: Bert I. Gordon in the BIG World
What better way to celebrate Halloween than with Bert I. Gordon, budget-compromised auteur of War of the Colossal Beast, Earth vs. the Spider, Picture Mommy Dead, Empire of the Ants,[…]
Actors & Personalities · DVD & Blu-ray · Silents
Blu-ray Review: Recent Silent Film Releases from Flicker Alley
Chaplin, Mabel Normand, Mack Sennett, Harry Langdon, W. C. Fields, Ben Turpin – the gang’s all here. Flicker Alley, a home video company founded in 2007, is not solely dedicated[…]
Activist & Political · Directors · Festivals & Awards
Red Carpets and Radicals: The Shadow of Reality at the Fifth Odessa International Film Festival (July 11-19, 2014)
The Fifth Odessa International Film Festival was destined to be unlike its previous editions. Only two months previously, Odessa suffered an unprecedented peak in civil violence with the death of[…]
Book Review: Allan Dwan and the Rise and Decline of the Hollywood Studios
Allan Dwan and the Rise and Decline of the Hollywood Studios, by Frederic Lombardi (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013, 370pp, $49.95 from the publisher’s website) Allan Dwan (1885-1981) was one of[…]
Activist & Political · Asian · Reviews
Introducing Kashmir: On Haider, Vishal Bharadwaj’s Riff on Hamlet
“Something is rotten in the state of Kashmir” – Improvising Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It has taken rather long for a feature film set in Kashmir to get critical acclaim for its[…]
Activist & Political · Essays · Horror · Reviews · SF & Fantasy
We Are Not Who We Are: Human Sacrifice, Philosophical Horror, and (Maybe) the End of the World
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part,[…]
Actors & Personalities · Essays · LGBT & Queer
Fifty Shades of Ick: Gay Panic and Star Discourse/Star Panic and Gay Discourse
“The privileging of star persona over actor’s craft insists that sex within a narrative cannot, in fact, be a purely storytelling tool: it is required to be both a character[…]
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