Capsized: A Tale of Two Poseidons
Society overboard! Upon the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 commentators have argued that American popular cultural has not changed significantly. Any minor changes have been[…]
Just Another Guy on the Lost Highway: Revisiting Two-Lane Blacktop
“It’s not some metaphorical struggle between two mighty kings of the road. It’s more like a self-deceiving ritual carried out by two of its prisoners.” In their April 1971 issue,[…]
Selma: Or the Absence of God
“It is a face that has ‘glimpsed into the abyss’ and never recovered from it.” Note: This essay examines the notion of “serenity” as it appears in section 9 of[…]
Game Over, Curtains Close: The Creative Failure of Videogame Movies
Lost in translation In the past three years, the cineplexes have been saturated with movies based on videogames, including big-screen adaptations of the Super Mario Brothers, Tomb Raider, Alone in[…]
Falling Angels, Rising People: A Brief Look at Sex-and-Spirituality in Cinema
Wings not desired Simply assuming that human goodness will triumph over its opposite is — as everybody knows — an immature stance. It makes us easy targets for scoundrels of[…]
African American · Essays · Genres · Lists · Movies
Routes to the City: The Ways of the New Black Films
“It’s independent thinking without the protection of an ‘indie’ label.” While hosting the Academy Awards in 2005, Chris Rock made the following claim: black films don’t have real names. “Barbershop?[…]
“We Still Have to Work Just as Hard as Before”: Michael Glawogger’s Workingman’s Death
“The tourist says that it’s a lot to carry and the worker agrees, then gets on with his work.” Fifteen years after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the[…]
Hairy on the Inside: Surrealism and Sexual Anxiety in Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves
“If there’s a beast in men, it meets its match in women too.” The Company of Wolves (1984) — a first foray into horror by future Interview with a Vampire[…]
What Time Now? Catching Up Hours in Tsai Ming-liang
What is the best way of placing a body? The opening scenes of The River (1997) are spent trying to make a body move and work in a realistic way. A film[…]
Superman Returns II: Superman . . . Bush . . . Perry White . . . Karl Rove . . .
It’s all here, including the “Mission Accomplished” moment Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns, which was the number one movie in America on its opening weekend in June 2006, is a listless,[…]
Superman Returns I: Superheroes for the New Millennium
“This new millennium hero lives in a fortress of solitary and alienated hyper-masculinity.” Note: This article contains spoilers. I never thought I would see the day when I would write[…]
Steele Vision: The Face of Italian Cult Cinema
“Again the camera shows how the imperfection of Asa’s face does not present an insurmountable obstacle to her being ultimately attractive.” Within cinema scholarship there is a reluctance to address[…]
Less Is Less: The 44th New York Film Festival
Past trumps present in this unremarkable fest If, as proclaimed by its director Richard Peña, the New York Film Festival is a “kind of report on the state of cinema,”[…]
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