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[…]
Absurdism · Activist & Political · Philosophy
Disappearing Act: Traumatic Formalism in Samuel Maoz’s Foxtrot (2017)
The film’s most problematic allegorical turn, however, is its subsequent and wholesale appropriation of Palestinian trauma. Despite the slaughter of four innocent Palestinians – by accident or not – Maoz[…]
We Need to Talk: Language and Communication in The Martian and Arrival
Uncharacteristically, The Martian and Arrival do not present us with a problematic dystopian future with which to grapple; a future in which everything has always already gone wrong. Instead, they[…]
Working-Class Heroes, Angry Young Men, and a Reprobate Redeemed: BFI’s Woodfall: A Revolution in British Cinema
Look Back in Anger (Tony Richardson, 1959); The Entertainer (Tony Richardson, 1960); Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1960); A Taste of Honey (Tony Richardson, 1961); The Loneliness of[…]
“Family Swallows Everything”: Artificiality and Determinism in Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018)
Something hereditary is passed down to posterity, all without their foreknowledge or approval; an unborn child has no say in what color eyes it will have, what its allergies may[…]
Watch it Again! Withnail and I (Bruce Robinson, 1987)
Living disillusioned in a post-Brexit Instagram-filtered age, standing at the periphery of the job market in a state of horror as the surplus of impressive graduates wander by, it is[…]
Franchises & Series · SF & Fantasy
Watch it Again! Star Wars – Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999)
We could call Episode I the first of the modern “digital epics.” It is perhaps the single most influential film on today’s Hollywood, the film that introduced the concept of[…]
Design for Killing: Function Follows Form into the Megalomania of Giallo
Filmmakers like Argento have no interest in sex per se. Suffering seems inessential, but terror and death are key, photographed with the same clinical absorption and aesthetic gloss as giallo-maestros[…]
Franchises & Series · Thrillers & Action
Holding On: Mission: Impossible and the Myth of the Perfect Man
Fallout is basically about Ethan holding on, not just to elevators, helicopters, or sliding rocks, but to immortality and the ridiculous notion of the perfect man. He is fast, strong,[…]
Movie Vacations · Music & Musicals
Living the Dream: Robert Altman’s Popeye Island
An Altman theme park does, in fact, exist. Sweethaven, the set of Altman’s 1980 musical Popeye, lives on in Mellieħa, a village on the island of Malta, where Harry Nilsson’s[…]
Andrew and Virginia Stone: Noir to the Bone
Andrew Stone and his fantastically helpful wife-editor have evolved an entirely different ethos of film-making.… If they want to blow up a train, they blow up a real train. If[…]
Out of the Shadows: A Hollywood Theater Impresario Emerges from LA’s Notorious Black Dahlia Murder Case
The middle-aged theater owner who preferred a discreet lifestyle suddenly found himself in the media spotlight only ten days after the Black Dahlia’s murder. Someone had gathered Elizabeth Short’s personal[…]
Franchises & Series · Thrillers & Action
Die Hard Turns Thirty: The Enduring Appeal of an ’80s Classic
As the years have gone by, the heroes have become less McClane-like and become, again, Ramboesque demigods. This goes for McClane, too. In the first Die Hard film, he looks[…]
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