The Best Sex in Contemporary Hollywood: Utopia, Ecstasy, and the (Classical) Musical Number in The 40-Year-Old Virgin
“There’s kind of nowhere else [the movie] could go.” Steve Carrell
Category: Genres
Inimitable Charm: Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox
“Anderson, like Dahl, seems to have told a story to appeal to a child’s inner adult.”
The New French New Wave? Sex and Horror in the Modern Arthouse
“The explicit nature of this wave of filmmaking can be interpreted as a riposte to modern cultural sensibilities.”
Pinned on Both Sides: No Escape for Paul Muni’s Fugitive
“The film suggests the denial of the common worker, whose service to industry is only as worthy as his social status.”
Counterculture · Directors · Documentaries · Interviews
Drawing from Life: Talking with Director George Hickenlooper
On Art, Identity, Families, Fragmentation, Medication . . . and Fulfillment
Documentaries · Music & Musicals
When Thelonious Met Pannonica: Hannah Rothschild’s The Jazz Baroness
“The Jazz Baroness goes beyond the barrel of stereotypes the screeching monkeys of society use against the intricate gusts of life swirling about us.” Really!
Some Cameroning, Part 2 – Cameron as Auteur
Can a filmmaker spend most of his or her artistic life recycling other people’s ideas and still be a true auteur? Sure. Why not? Any idea, theme, style, or attitude[…]
Tortured Longing is the new coke
I can feel the Twilight zeitgeist in the air tonight, perhaps it’s because I live across from the cinema and the line around the block and I hear them out[…]
Activist & Political · Reviews · War
How James Stewart Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb: Anthony Mann’s Strategic Air Command
“Chew popcorn to avoid grinding teeth, comrades.”
Of Perfect Plans and Acts of Creation: Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing
“His plan mirrors Johnny’s, that is, pieces of the plan are known to one person: Johnny and Stanley; and not until the end do we see most of their pieces come into place.
Essays · LGBT & Queer · Writers & Critics
Contagious Homosexuality: Cruising and Sodom and Gomorrah
“In both Sodom and Gomorrah and Cruising, homosexuality – and its alternate currents – is caught with a glance.”
Activist & Political · Reviews
“They Come in Peace”: Andy Fickman’s Race to Witch Mountain
“Only saviors can save polluted planets, yellow cab drivers are losers . . .”
Porno to the People: The Danish Revolution That Liberated America
“Tease was out, honesty was in.”
Activist & Political · Directors · Interviews
Just Say Oui: An Interview with the Yes Men
“I’m shitting bricks, thinking he’s onto me.”
The Dead Things We Already Are: Pod People, Body Snatching, and the Horrors of Business as Usual
“We keep returning to this story about pod people because we’re terrified of the continuing erosion of our physicality in the postmodern era.”
Festivals & Awards · LGBT & Queer
Lucky 13: The 2009 Portland Lesbian and Gay Film Festival
Getting out of the ghetto
Activist & Political · Crime · Historical & Epic · Reviews
The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover: Larry Cohen’s The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover
How a movie exposé of “abuse of power” defends those in power and their institutions
Reviews · Thrillers & Action · War
Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds: Film Kills
“Tarantino thus concedes some of his omnipotence to the medium he so deftly manipulates.”
“Do You Find Me Sadistic?” Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds
“This is the World War II film confronting its Jungian shadow, acknowledging its darkest impulses and finally purging them.”
Activist & Political · Drama · Reviews
Critical Distance: What Knowing Knows About 9/11
“Where Cloverfield provocatively blurs the line between being ‘about’ 9/11 and being (mere) entertainment, Knowing lands squarely in the latter camp.”
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