Actors & Personalities · Interviews
“The Best Jewish Cowboy”: An Interview with James Caan
“Hard times will make a monkey eatred peppers.”
Happy Happy Birthday Baby! Steve McQueen (b. 3/24/30): Fifty Years of the King of Cool
“Steve understood real people, particularly misfits, like nobody else.It was just the Hollywood brass he loathed.”
Historical & Epic · Medieval · Women in Film
Medieval Arthuriana Was Always Scary, but Not in the Way You’d Think: On Sir Gawain and The Green Knight
The adaptation is successful not just in its understanding of how irreverent and illogical the narrative space of medieval romance is and always has been, but also in how it[…]
Crime · Gothic · Horror · Melodrama · Photo Essays
To Cut or Not to Cut? The POV Shots in Eyes Without a Face (and how they differ from those in Psycho)
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
Monster in the Machine: Monstrosity and Marxism in Spirited Away
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
Novel into Film: Adapting Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter
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
A White Darkness: Maya Deren in Haiti
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
Caricature and Empathy in the Work of the Coen Brothers
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
Candymen: Slumming, Scarifying, and Gentrifying in 1992 and 2022
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
Book Review: Gemma King, Jacques Audiard
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
Memoria: An Existential Wake-Up Call from Film’s Possible Future
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
“To Know Is Not Enough”: On Amy Goldstein’s Documentary The Unmaking of a College
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 New Old West Side Story
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[…]
Film Noir, Bête Blanche: Blood on the Snow in Fargo
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
How Did Hungarians Do It? The Hungarian World of Ernst Lubitsch
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
Designated Mourner: On Christian Petzold’s Transit
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
Mae West: Pleasure Woman
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
“Baby, I’m Having Fun”: Allan Arkush and Kent Beyda Discuss Get Crazy
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[…]
Billy Wilder’s “Home Run with the Bases Loaded”: Some Keys to The Apartment
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
Post-Irony Film & The Scary of Sixty-First
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[…]
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