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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto LXII – gordsellar.com on:
The Esteemed Black Actresses Who Finally Have the Spotlight – The New York Times – Celebrity News on:
Class System · Drama · Hollywood · Melodrama
Before we were townies, we were snobs. * * * Before Hollywood regarded “Bostonian” as a synonym for “townie” – see Mystic River (2003), The Departed (2006), Gone Baby Gone[…]
Colonialism · Drama · Exile and Displacement
Spoiler Warning: This piece discusses all major events in the film. * * * Óliver Laxe’s Sirāt fuses the fear of losing oneself with the trembling topography of the desert;[…]
Animation · Drama · Myth and Archetype · War
We are, each of us, mearcstapas, navigating the borders between lands. Home, in Vinland Saga, extends beyond geopolitics and ancestry. Whenever geographical territories are breached, cultural and personal identities are[…]
Festivals & Awards · Film Culture · Film History · Programmers · Silents
The online program emphasizes this living quality of film history. Each restoration carries its own provenance, its own narrative of survival. * * * October finds audience viewing habits leaning[…]
Cult Cinema · Dreams · Experimental & Underground · Exploitation & Erotica · Gothic · Indies · Sex & Relationships
In Franco’s world, beauty existed only through risk. The rawness, the repetition, the obsessive zooms were not acts of carelessness but of liberation. They were his rebellion against the clean,[…]
Central and South America · Colonialism · Imperialism · Marxism · Politics · Satire
Alex Cox’s Walker (1987) is an instructive example of how to make a film about modern political issues without becoming overly burdened by the present moment. In telling the story[…]
Marxism · Philosophy · Politics · Sports · Theory
Bennett Miller’s 2008 film Moneyball depicts the unfolding on-screen of a contradiction. Moneyball as an idea is a theoretical understanding of how the game of baseball works (based on a[…]
Animation · Artificial Intelligence (AI) · Colonialism · Essays · Horror · SF & Fantasy
Ultimately, the comparison of human–ecology relationships in both The Martian and Scavengers Reign reveals two contrasting modes of becoming alien: The former envisions human survival as contingent on an anthropocentric[…]
Class System · Crime · Essays · Race
The ethical contrast between due process and vigilantism is not the deepest fault line between these movies. A sharper divide concerns who counts as fully human within the moral universe[…]
Directors · Film Culture · Film History · Film Studies · Memoir · Writers & Critics
Joseph McBride, filmed in 1970, is taking notes on his wrist, a habit he picked up while reviewing films, in his role as the critic and historian Mister Pister in[…]
Body Horror · Eco-horror · Essays · Horror · Myth and Archetype · Splatter & Gore
This article argues that the history of global horror is not a linear progression of influence from a dominant West to the passive rest of the world but a dynamic,[…]
Courtroom Drama · Drama · Exile and Displacement · Myth and Archetype
“They’re not monsters. They’re just tired.” – Ada, Atlantics (2019) “I placed her in the sea so that the sea. . . .” – Laurence, Saint Omer (2022) * *[…]
Depicted as perfect boyfriends, they model an ideal set of standards for a desirable heterosexual male romantic partner while using those standards not to pursue their own self-interests but rather[…]
Artificial Intelligence (AI) · Experimental & Underground
Director/author’s statement: My film Recorded as Stated by Me (V. Shashkov, 2024), released on Amazon Prime at the end of April 2025, is set in post-mobilization Russia and traces cultural[…]
African American · Asian · Drama · Essays
Both films will give the critic searching for a standard class-focused reading a headache. We have to admit that the kidnapper exerts an imposition on the success of “the other.”[…]
Activist & Political · Brazilian Cinema · Communism and Socialism · Drama · Politics
Retornarán los libros, las canciones que quemaron las manos asesinas. Renacerá mi pueblo de su ruina y pagarán su culpa los traidores. The books will return, the songs burned by[…]
Class System · Crime · Hollywood · Noir · Pre-Code
When the Production Code loosened and America lurched through assassinations, riots, and televised body bags, the gangster stopped functioning as a moral lesson and started reading as a symptom –[…]
Drama · Drugs · Melodrama · Men & Masculinity
Due to cortisone overdose, Ed turns into a radical enforcer of outdated values at school. His expectations, rather than aligning with the conventional disciplinary regime of the time, deviate into[…]
These Fists Break Bricks: How Kung Fu Movies Swept America and Changed the World, by Grady Hendrix and Chris Poggiali. Revised and expanded paperback edition, Running Press, 2025, 384 pages,[…]
