Watch It Again! Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996)
Trainspotting has been criticized as “pro-drug” for its flighty and pictorial depictions of heroin use, but I don’t think that’s even an issue. The grimy mundanity of the world surrounding[…]
Watch It Again! Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
Hitchcock’s one-word titles have never been so instructive. Psycho is the feeling of being preyed on by your self, as by one of Norman’s stuffed birds. It is the primal[…]
Biopic · Drama · Essays · TV & Streaming
Video Killed the Video Star: Antonio Campos’s Christine (2016) and Film’s Continued Struggle to Expose Television
“In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in ‘blood and guts,’ and in living color, you are going to see another first – attempted suicide.” –[…]
Activist & Political · African American · Music & Musicals
Los Angeles Cinema and the Utopia of La La Land
Few movies have represented LA with such fawning reverence and nostalgia as La La Land. The filmmakers depict a clean, spare, elegant city, sluiced in mid-century Technicolor, consisting almost exclusively[…]
Directors · Interviews · Romance
Staging Pleasure: In Conversation with The Love Witch’s Anna Biller
On The Love Witch: “I like to make films with a kind of dream logic. My films are a mix of reality and fantasy, or a mix of what is[…]
Activist & Political · Biopic · Documentaries
Dispatch from Tribeca: Get Me Roger Stone (Dylan Bank, Daniel DiMauro, and Morgan Pehme, 2017)
Jeffrey Toobin, whose 2008 New Yorker article inspired this film, describes Roger Stone as “a malevolent Forrest Gump.” Stone is more than okay with that. He’s happy for people to[…]
Dispatch from Tribeca: Keep the Change (Rachel Israel, 2017, world premiere)
Keep the Change does something unusual, casting actors on the autism spectrum to play autistic roles. The strategy is already a success in its first outing – the film just[…]
Activist & Political · Documentaries
Dispatch from Tribeca: Wasted! The Story of Food Waste (Anna Chai and Nari Kye, 2017)
New York’s prestigious Tribeca Film Festival started April 19 and runs through April 30. Claire Baiz reports on a film screened in the fest’s “Spotlight Documentary” section on one of[…]
Actors & Personalities · Noir · War
Strangers in Purgatory: On the “Jewish Experience,” Film Noir, and Émigré Actors Fritz Kortner and Ernst Deutsch
An examination of two of these émigrés – Fritz Kortner and Ernst Deutsch, major Central European actors, very well known in their home countries before leaving them in duress, both[…]
Activist & Political · Counterculture · Crime · Drama
Watch It Again! Joe (John G. Avildsen, 1970)
The counterculture and the reactionaries are equally problematic in John G. Avildsen’s complex, underrated Joe. With its bitter, murderous white males at the center blaming their, and the world’s, ills on marginalized groups[…]
The Searcher: James Gray’s The Lost City of Z (2016)
Much of The Lost City of Z is genuinely gripping, in part because the hardships and horrors it depicts are presented so matter-of-factly. A tribe of hostile natives, who at first[…]
Religion & Spirituality · TV & Streaming
Solus Sanctus: On The Young Pope
The esoteric spiritualism of Pope Lenny brings God crashing to earth. God is impotent; if God is in everything, then God is as sacred as the flotsam of the world,[…]
No Masters or Kings: On Sergei Polunin and Dancer (Steven Cantor, 2016)
The story is that of the driven, disciplined youth turned rebellious and excessive – brought to the fore by Ilan Eshkeri’s viscerally punchy soundtrack – but also of an almost[…]
Essays · Philosophy · SF & Fantasy
The Fall of Donnie Darko: Re-Viewing the Myth of a Generation
In honor of its 15th anniversary, Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko plays throughout the U.S. this year starting March 30 at select theaters in a 4K restoration – in some cases in the[…]
Another Layer Under the Skin (2013): Racial Empathy and Self-Knowledge
Our failures of understanding may express themselves as prejudicial disregard of others of a different color, race, religion, or gender. From this vantage, the film invites the viewer to reflect[…]
Happy Birthday, Doris Day! (b. April 3, 1922) All Her Films, Ranked and Annotated
When I wrote my piece in praise of Doris Day for Bright Lights back in December 2015, I had seen about half of her thirty-nine movies. Now that I’ve seen[…]
Film Technology & History · Sports
The Birth of the Feature Film – 120 Years Ago: The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight (1897)
There was just one hitch: Rector and his camera operators had to be inside the camera. * * * On March 17, 1897, in an open-air arena in Carson City,[…]
Black Soil: Ixcanul (Jayro Bustamante, 2015)
And some are pretty enough / And some are poor indeed; And now again the people / Call it but a weed. – Alfred Lord Tennyson. “The Flower” * * *[…]
Familiar Faces: Some Notes on the 2017 SxSW Film Festival
Though moving a bit more stiffly in Lucky, Harry Dean is still moving, and that, the film says, is a beautiful thing. * * * SxSW wrapped up this past[…]
Experimental & Underground · Romance · SF & Fantasy
Watch it Again! La Belle et la Bête (France, Jean Cocteau, 1946)
Many have captured in equally luxurious fantasies the Beast that longs in men to be more than he is, and it is this Beast that Disney aims at literal children.[…]
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