Crime · Gothic · Horror · Melodrama · Photo Essays
Franju demonstrates how beauty hides pain, until pain becomes beautiful. * * * Georges Franju’s Les yeux sans visage/Eyes Without a Face is a reliably haunting film, a beautiful nightmare[…]
Animation · Asian · Communism and Socialism
The gold that No-Face dispenses to the workers later crumbles into a pile of dirt. Conjured from nothing, No-Face’s fabricated currency undermines the very system of profit that capitalism is[…]
Drama · Women in Film · Writers & Critics
We come to find out as viewers, whether we believe in Leda’s self-governing comportment at the beginning or not, that this task of motherhood is never-ending; each work demonstrates to[…]
Experimental & Underground · Religion & Spirituality · Women in Film
The volition of these dancers is as clear as the sense that it is not their own. Deren mirrors this depersonalization masterfully; her camera splits a man between his reflections,[…]
Absurdism · Comedy · Directors
Ethan and Joel Coen have shared writing, directing, and producing credits on their collaborations until their recent hiatus from working together. Here they are on location for their 2004 comedy[…]
African American · Drama · Dreams · Horror · Urban Conflict
Good mornin’, Mr. Benson, I see you’re doin’ well. If I had me a shotgun I’d blow you straight to hell. – Robert Hunter/Jerry Garcia, “Candyman,” 1970 * * *[…]
Books · French Cinema · Thrillers & Action
Gemma King, Jacques Audiard. Manchester University Press, 2021. * * * In the first book-length exploration of the controversial director’s filmography, part of Manchester University Press’s French Film Directors series,[…]
Experimental & Underground · Mystery · New Media
Apichatpong’s film is the bang in the night that has the power to shock us out of convention, to help us open our eyes and ears to the rich and[…]
Activist & Political · Documentaries · Education
The Unmaking of a College is a stealthy Hampshire College recruitment/endowment film, but it’s easier to breathe through the subtle sales pitch because the story is true and the message[…]
The Sharks and Jets may have been initially inspired by Shakespeare’s Capulets and Montagues, but the gang members we see are really first cousins of the “troubled youth” in popular[…]
The horror in this film is not the noir violence that it brings to the bucolic Midwestern setting, but the inability of that violence to leave a mark – the[…]
Comedy · Directors · Eastern European · Romance · Writers & Critics
Lubitsch biographers and critics have accepted the lore that the Hungarian plays he used for his films were inferior. That widely held perception has come about because Lubitsch’s admirers want[…]
Drama · War · Writers & Critics
The refugees’ babel is a constant background presence in Seghers’s novel, a kind of Greek chorus commenting on the various ship arrivals and departures, and spreading news of any developments[…]
Actors & Personalities · Pre-Code · Sex & Relationships · Women in Film
West is a born outlaw, a queen of the underworld who knows that two and two are four but five will get you 10 if you know how to work[…]
Comedy · DVD & Blu-ray · Music & Musicals · Production History
ALLAN ARKUSH: Get Crazy never actually got a real release, you know. It was in theaters for a month. . . . A month? I’m sorry, a week, in some[…]
In the corporate world the film depicts, the lower-level executives are small-time Lotharios who seek no more than sex from female underlings. Their boss, however, battens on the love he[…]
Comedy · Crime · Drugs · LGBT & Queer · New Media
The Scary of Sixty-First expands the umbrella of “buzzword cinema” — it’s a Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy with a lesbian sex scene by a popular podcaster and it-girl of the edgy[…]
African American · Literature and Film · Women in Film
The staying power of Passing in 2021 goes far beyond its ripped-from-the-headlines resonances, however. Larsen’s story endures, on the one hand, for its intricate depiction of female friendship, rivalry, and[…]
Essays · Pandemic · SF & Fantasy · War
Excerpted from the author’s new critical study, Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s: The Bunkered Decades (Oxford University Press, December 2021), with the kind permission of[…]
Activist & Political · Asian · TV & Streaming · War
This is the first piece of a multi-part, long-form series entitled “The Twilight Zone and the Culture Wars.” The series spotlights several episodes from Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone and[…]
