Actors & Personalities · Reviews
All-American Medea: The Radical Pleasures of Beyond the Forest
“Today’s Rosa Moline would treat her lack of sophistication as a resource and her isolation as a launching pad.”
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Actors & Personalities · Reviews
“Today’s Rosa Moline would treat her lack of sophistication as a resource and her isolation as a launching pad.”
“Sanshiro is ultimately after spiritual gain — to achieve the purity he found in the moonlit flower.”
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Df1CGxqS1MA] Nine out of ten bloggers agree – the dreams in Christopher Nolan’s INCEPTION are not particularly dream-like, at least, not much more so than the action sequences in your average[…]
Classic films come about through a lucky combination of accident and inspiration. In the case of THE GODFATHER, one of writer/director Francis Coppola’s most inspired choices was to model his film not on[…]
To wrap up her gothic novels, Ann Radcliffe explained away her supernatural trappings at the conclusion. Imagine a story that explains away its action in every scene. Hitchcock was heavy-handed when[…]
Dogtooth is an audaciously visceral statement that somehow avoids both flamboyance and gratuity, proving that on-screen shocks need not always be accompanied by a masturbatory aftertaste.
Talk about wish fulfillment for kids – the Airbender mythos has it nailed. As a child dreams of gaining superpowers, he may wish for them all: i.e, the numerous abilities of[…]
Beyond the Forest Dir. King Vidor, 1949 In America, the tagline read “Nobody’s As Good As Bette When She’s Bad.” In French they simply called it La Garce, ‘the bitch.’[…]
I wonder about those who can watch Jarmusch any time. They must really love life’s randomness, how we must create order in what can be a pretty disordered universe. They[…]
Double Take Dir. Johan Grimonprez The documentary Double Take is bookended by two of the scariest moments in American history: the launch of Sputnik and the release of The Birds.[…]
Call this a western exploitation film. Jonah Hex, based on a comic book series of the same name, has much more action than thought or sense. It borrows from the[…]
Hand-drawn animation, once the mainstay of Disney and other studios that created “cartoons” for popular consumption, is becoming something of a lost art. Audiences seem to prefer Pixar-style CGI. Disney[…]
In his nonfiction text On Writing, Stephen King describes the artist’s work as telepathy. Hardly the new-age type, King is referring to how thoughts can transmit though a quiet practice[…]
The Dark House (Dom ZÅ‚y) Dir. Wojcieh Smarzowski, Poland 2009 What the Inuit language is to snow, Polish is to varieties of squalor and mess. Take melina, an alcoholic’s den,[…]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UIonNH-rz8] So this filmmaker, Johan Grimonprez, who teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York, gets the idea of creating a fictional film about Alfred Hitchcock constructed largely[…]
There’s a strange defamiliarization going on in Catherine Breillat’s films. It could result from her frequent use of a stable camera, or what must be a controlled directing style. Through[…]
The pathos is never maudlin or icky, but rather soothing (thanks to Lorre’s velvety vocal delivery), creepy and a little post-modern – with Lorre’s own weird real life looks keeping him from ever ‘getting the girl’ no matter how many movies he’s in.
If any movement made cinema history into a reactionary narrative, it would be the French New Wave. A batch of cinephiles, most working as critics for Cahiers du Cinema (established[…]
Another masterpiece by the late Frank Frazetta (1928-2010), and a classic example of how Hollywood studio thinking — a misguided attempt to reach the widest demographic possible — destroyed the potential[…]
From the outset, it seems to be a bold-faced cash-in culled from little investment. In Babies, a French-produced doc which got a surprisingly wide release this past weekend, we have[…]
