Spike Jonze’s Her and the Essence of Intimacy
Samantha’s voice may have a loving tenor, but the words themselves are mournful, and it’s easy to see why. So long as the two remain together, Theodore cannot live to[…]
Category: Movies
The You and Me Inside Llewyn Davis
“We’ve consumed the romanticism of the artist, and now we’re busily consuming the history of that consumption.” It’s an accomplishment to produce a period piece whose authenticity comes through the[…]
Hanging in a Classroom Some Day: Woody Allen, Artistic Legacy, and the Blu-ray Editions of Annie Hall and Manhattan
Annie Hall is warm, taut rather than loose, angular instead of fuzzy, Manhattan is a love letter to New York, a hymn to neurosis, and a delicate straddling of the[…]
Marcel Ophuls and the Great Big Blank: Montreal International Documentary Festival 2013 (Nov. 12-23, 2013)
“With Ophuls too we need to be on our guard, given the idiosyncratic way he shapes material. There is often a tricky leakage of voice-over between successive scenes: at one[…]
Activist & Political · Reviews
Doing the American Hustle
“People believe what they want to believe because the guy who made this was so good that it’s real to everybody. Now who’s the master, the painter or the forger?”[…]
Blocked or Taking Stock? A Very Brief, Not Too Bleak Mid-Winter View (Albeit with the Aid of Spectacles)
“I now present Anthony Quinn (1915-2001) – the mighty one himself – in a light few will recognize: not Quinn the rank sentimentalist ham (or Eskimo), but Quinn the deeply[…]
Blank Like a Panther: Cat People (1982) blu-ray review
“Even if Schrader would like to completely eliminate any ‘magic’ or dream-into-reality bleeding, it’s still there – the boundaries of his material threaten to swamp him at every turn, so kudos to him for at least not running in fear back behind the phallic bars of patriarchal condescension that was such an annoyance in the original. “
Activist & Political · Reviews
Consumerist Ultimate Indigestion: La Grande Bouffe’s Deadly Physiological Pleasures
“To go to the cinema is like to eat or shit, it’s a physiological act, it’s urban guerrilla” ~ Marco Ferreri Francis Bacon once said: “We’re flesh, potential carcasses. If[…]
The Wolf of Wall Street: Who Are We to Judge?
In Jarhead, his memoir of the first Iraq War, Tony Swofford calls our attention to a paradox of “antiwar” films. When he and his fellow Marines hear they’re about to[…]
French Fusions: Cinemania Festival, Montréal, 2013
“No-one can get over the paradox of a sphinx head on top of a chic model’s body: the sense of this slight figure propping up a magnificent mask.” Cinemania has[…]
Where Do We Go from Here? The 54th Thessaloniki Film Festival (Nov. 1-10, 2013)
Cinema has a way of capturing the unease of life, those wearying sharp fragments and provocations of everyday experience that reveal a greater truth. At the 54th Thessaloniki International Film[…]
Blue Is the Warmest Color 1: Unresolved Alienations of Class
“Pornographic,” “voyeuristic,” “clinical” . . . at a time when gay cinema is known for its matter-of-fact, graphic handling of sex, it’s surprising that the sex scenes in Abdellatif Kechiche’s[…]
Favorite Films of 2013
“Rather than some good safe white elephant of a film or a smutty feel-bad historical repressionist masterpiece, these are films that have escaped the maze of cliché with moxy, wit, and nutz.”
Post-Sensory Pong: A Future-Shock Analysis of Virginia Postrel’s “Who Needs Raise When you have TV?”
Now anyone who can scrape together a few hundred dollars can load up on enough movie streams and DV-R and giant LCD screens to never leave the house, so who needs a nice house?
Future-Pissed: THE VISITOR (1979), AKIRA (1988), TANK GIRL (1995)
Though last December’s lack of promised Mayan doomsday never panned out, December 2013 is laden with new DVDs and theatrical revivals that allow us to pretend the world ended as far back as 1979. Oh if only… we might all be rolling with Humongous by now, or Bane, or what’s the difference?
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Reviews
Clint, Caught in the Act: On The Beguiled, and Don Siegel’s Leading Man
“While the premise of an injured soldier recuperating in a house full of smitten women seems ripe for male-fantasy debasement, the film is deeply interested in the psyches of its[…]
Bridging the Popular/Arthouse Divide: The Kinotavr Film Festival (2013)
“This year’s Kinotavr didn’t suggest a Russian film industry in meltdown even though some of the expected highlights were to prove deeply disappointing. On the other hand, there were pleasant[…]
Bright Sights: Recent DVDs: Foolish Wives (von Stroheim), Here, Then (Mao Mao), Red River (Hawks), The Big Parade (Vidor)
An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases Foolish Wives (Erich von Stroheim, 1922) Reading that the initial cut of Foolish Wives ran[…]
Crime · Exploitation & Erotica · Reviews
The Di Blasio Grime Revival: Ms. 45 (1981), Little Nicky (2000)
This is a film from the era of Bernhard Goetz, Curtis Sliwa and the Guardian Angels, and of course, Charles Bronson finding himself facing muggers wherever he may go.
The Horror of Origins: In Ron Honthaner’s The House on Skull Mountain
“This emergent form — the death’s head — is not a part of the scene, but rather a reflection upon it, potentially a visualization of the character’s thoughts — evoked[…]
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