Mother Nature: Ramón Salazar’s La Enfermedad del Domingo (2018)
“All the things we should’ve said that I never said/ All the things we should’ve done that we never did/ All the things we should’ve given but I didn’t/ Oh,[…]
Horror · Women in Film · Writers & Critics
Ardel Wray: Val Lewton’s Forgotten Screenwriter
Despite the fact that Wray had no previous screen credits, Lewton hired her to rework the story of I Walked with a Zombie with only two months to go before[…]
Post-Horror Kinships: From Goodnight Mommy to Get Out
“The aesthetic features of post-horror replicate the mixture of shame, confusion, shock, and anxiety about the future experienced by liberal Americans in the midst of the Tea Party and Trump’s[…]
Wars, Whores, and the Moral Reconstruction of the West: Unforgiven and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
The characters’ fates are determined more by chance than by anything else, so pursuing justice in Unforgiven is about as futile as fighting an organized battle in Good Bad Ugly.[…]
“Nicholas Who?” An Irreverently Linear Journey Through the Work of the Late Nicolas Roeg, Director of Well Over Four Films
“There’s something that happened, and there’s a kind of ring around that event – or it’s fenced off – and everything else is okay around it, but there’s just something[…]
Book Review: It’s OK with Me: Hollywood, the 1970s, and the Return of the Private Eye, by Jason Bailey
It’s OK with Me: Hollywood, the 1970s, and the Return of the Private Eye, by Jason Bailey. $11.99, 78 pp. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2018. Across individual analysis of about[…]
Directors · Documentaries · Essays
But It Did Happen! Werner Herzog and the Ecstatic Truth
I think that this delicate line between reality, and fact, and truth needs to be more clearly defined. We have to redefine reality.1 – Werner Herzog There are dignified stupidities.[…]
Designing Women: Talking with Costume Designer Olga Mill and Production Designer Grace Yun about Hereditary and First Reformed
We worked to create a “slow film” aesthetic, with distinct moments where it broke from the rules. Paul planned to use boredom and duration as the method, with longer takes,[…]
Comedy · Counterculture · Drama
Lather, Rinse, Repeat: The Enduring Charms of Shampoo
Everyone in Shampoo is id driven, with the audience taking voyeuristic pleasure at the absence of any self-awareness. George is inarticulate and largely passive, more preyed upon than preying with[…]
Godot’s Never Coming: Almacenados’ Anti-Absurdist Vision of the Workplace
The Prince: “I haven’t yet had a report from your office. What’s your work like?” The Warden: “Every night the same. Every night till the heart beats as if it[…]
Le Misanthrope: On Lars von Trier
If there’s an authorial hand in Trier’s films, it serves only to pull the wings off the fly. * * * In the thirty-five-odd years he’s been active, Lars von[…]
Festivals & Awards · Women in Film
Pop Deluxe: Natalie Portman and Sasheer Zamata at Toronto International Film Festival (Sept. 6-16, 2018)
Rather than a fascist leader, in Vox Lux Celeste suggests a different sort of monstrosity – a receptacle for the nation’s horrors and fantasies, even more than a Madonna or a[…]
John Wayne Burns His Hand: Gestures in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962)
Some actors’ gestures are the equivalent of a great singer, dancer, or athlete achieving the heights of their profession. And the reason so many people respond to Ford’s films by[…]
Peter Yates’ Breaking Away at 40: An Early Warning of America’s Culture War
Theirs is a passive outlook, young men products of a culture that for too many generations has grown to depend on a corporate entity, mistaking the mill for a permanent,[…]
Galactic Angst: Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy Swallows the Cosmos
The demon-summoning, LED laser-lens flares, medieval weaponry-fetishizing, churning synth and axe rhythms, and the overall simmer of curdling darkness are collective flickers of a recurrent, suffocatingly inescapable nightmare, one fueled[…]
Festivals & Awards · New Media
Got a Light? David Lynch’s Festival of Disruption (Oct. 13-14, 2018)
Francis Ford Coppola introduced the screening of his Robin Williams vehicle Jack. Since this was the Festival of Disruption, Coppola said he wanted to “disrupt” by screening his worst film,[…]
“The Joke’s on History”: Retro-Reality, Twee, and Mediated Nostalgia in La La Land (2016)
Mia: It feels really nostalgic to me. Sebastian: That’s the point. Mia: Are people going to like it? Sebastian: Fuck ’em. – La La Land * * * The popular[…]
Virtually Everything: All Godard and Tsai at Melbourne International Film Festival 2018 (Aug. 2-19)
Even more than in The River, with The Deserted we are sensually implicated in the small gestures of rest and relief, saving graces in this abandoned world. When Lee later[…]
Costume Drama · Literature and Film
Seeing Wharton Through Scorsese’s Lens: Fidelity and the Blonde Siren in The Age of Innocence (1993)
The otherwise remarkably faithful adaptation, however, makes an incongruent turn when Scorsese reverses Wharton’s color casting of the two female protagonists by portraying Ellen Olenska and May Welland as blonde[…]
Activist & Political · African American · Counterculture
Black Signifyin’: White Crisis in Spike Lee’s Blackkklansman
The stealthy campaign of subterfuge undertaken by Stallworth is only one possible stance of resistance. And in adopting such a form of civil disobedience, Stallworth aligns himself with a cultural[…]
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