Drama · Historical & Epic · War
The Third Man ends with rejection, physical and emotional death, a descent into a sewer, a walk through a graveyard and cold silence. The ruins of Vienna come to symbolize[…]
Covering topics as banal as the production of plastics and as profound as cultural appropriation, these films aren’t workaday projects so much as serious visual essays that extend Resnais’ preoccupation[…]
Drugs · Military and Paramilitary · Thrillers & Action · Urban Conflict · War
“In the company of wolves was a stretcher made of cobblestone curfews as the federales performed their custodial customs quite well.” – At the Drive In * * * In[…]
A particular issue is the degree to which the film departs from “fact.” Significant departures from the historical record, if they become frequent enough, are sufficient to sabotage any “historical[…]
Though some have criticized Nolan’s rigidity and near mathematical precision in tackling a historical event (no doubt provoked by the director’s admittedly frustrating tendency to wax philosophic on his own[…]
Activist & Political · Documentaries · War
Naturally, Huston was furious about the film’s suppression and remained so all through the intervening years. In his words, “I think it boils down to the fact that they wanted[…]
Actors & Personalities · Noir · War
An examination of two of these émigrés – Fritz Kortner and Ernst Deutsch, major Central European actors, very well known in their home countries before leaving them in duress, both[…]
Biopic · Historical & Epic · War
Repeatedly, the tragedies in Marty’s life lead him to question the worth of life, and repeatedly the order and stability of the parade re-enters to ease his mind, allowing him[…]
He studied and documented his country’s history, politics, and national myths in both film and theater, and was a beloved mentor to countless young filmmakers. * * * Andrzej Wajda[…]
Activist & Political · Drama · Essays · War · Writers & Critics
The response to The Deer Hunter amounted to a serious public debate over the Vietnam War that extended beyond film critics to engage a wide range of viewers. It wasn’t[…]
Activist & Political · Crime · Historical & Epic · War
The killers were more than willing to help and, when we filmed them boastfully describing their crimes against humanity, we met no resistance whatsoever. All doors were open. Local police[…]
One member of the meeting, Bohdan Poremba, called Interrogation a “premeditated lie” and, in perhaps the strangest criticism of the film, expressed his disappointment that it only showed a few[…]
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[…]
I will focus on films that contain both of the following markers: (1) an American character exhibits daring but reckless behavior, which triggers continuing, gory disaster for a multinational group;[…]
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
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[…]
Directors · Documentaries · Experimental & Underground · War
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[…]
Activist & Political · Actors & Personalities · War
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[…]
Activist & Political · Uncategorized · War
“Does it all come down to the injustice of 3,000 people dying on 9/11? But at some level everybody went through that. Yet few of us thereafter felt the need to cast off every other human part of ourselves in order to find ‘justice,’ whatever that means in such contexts.”
“If Bigelow is not assembling the story, who is? The darkest implication of this is that Zero Dark Thirty takes no stand on the events of the last decade because the sources on which it relies believe that there is no stand to take. Her sources believe that the existence of war is a value-free fact; so this is what Bigelow believes.”
