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June 4, 2026
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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:
The whole film can be viewed as a consciousness-raising of sorts. While even new-wave French auteurs fall into predictable madeleine-inspired memory spirals riffing on (not to put too fine a point[…]
Activist & Political · Biopic · Essays
These films aren’t merely exercises in cinematic glorification – like Clint Eastwood’s speech, they are a part of a uniquely American myth-making process, posing straw-man moral tests for their protagonists[…]
Activist & Political · Animation
What the movie gets wrong is at the story’s heart: not the goddess Te Fiti’s, but the human heart. People, not gods, were the cause of environmental devastation on Pacific[…]
The truth is that they tend toward philosophical absurdism, rather than nihilism, and this perspective is what either makes or breaks their film in terms of commercial appeal. The draw,[…]
Activist & Political · Asian · Directors · Interviews
“India has always assigned a special sort of power to film . . . an extraordinary power to corrupt gullible masses has been given to cinema.” – Rakesh Sharma *[…]
Activist & Political · Books · Horror
By the mid-2000s, following social unrest and political upheaval in France, and culminating with the emergence of the “torture-porn” horror subgenre in the United States with titles such as Saw[…]
Activist & Political · Crime · Essays
“Hey, buddy. We’re exactly the same. What’s happening to these people happened to my ancestors, and it happened to your ancestors.” – Alberto to Marcus in Hell or High Water,[…]
Directors · Film Technology & History · SF & Fantasy
The very foundation of Lucas’s cinematic philosophy is newness – this comes through in his obsession with technological possibilities, and through his genuinely childlike pursuit of spectacle and wonder. His[…]
His Girl Friday’s headlong pace feels like that of modern life, and its rapid-fire, overlapping dialogue calls to mind our modern media babble, with innumerable people around the globe and[…]
African · Experimental & Underground
Bekolo’s cinema is not just “African,” or postcolonial, or experimental, or narrative. It is also a cinema that constantly searches for itself, for what it is and what it can accomplish.[…]
Experimental & Underground · Festivals & Awards
With so many films being made – many of which will never receive wide distribution – how do you navigate the glut of movies at a whopper like Toronto? *[…]
Essays · Horror · Religion & Spirituality
If the evil spirit is “seen,” that is, reflected . . . he is overcome. – Marie-Louise von Franz Unmask Satan, and you vanquish him. – St. Augustine * *[…]
Our cinematic genome, meanwhile, is becoming – if not always more clearly defined – certainly more rich and diverse and, at the same time, more universal than ever. * *[…]
Regret is perhaps Payne’s greatest theme. The continual human dramedy, the elegiac comedy, a country full of people with limited potential raised to think everyone is special, confined souls struggling[…]
Alice isn’t all high-concept reverie and mystical melancholy. After a series of self-consciously arthouse films and sombre homages – and bookended between Another Woman and Crimes and Misdemeanours on the[…]
He studied and documented his country’s history, politics, and national myths in both film and theater, and was a beloved mentor to countless young filmmakers. * * * Andrzej Wajda[…]
Hooper’s interest in horror articulates itself primarily in formal invention: how can the frame be used to incapacitate viewer expectations? * * * Tobe Hooper’s most recent feature film, Djinn[…]
African American · Crime · Documentaries
By ignoring the black lives involved, the new Netflix documentary Amanda Knox (premiering on Netflix on September 30) is not only a very white film, it ends up producing its own miscarriage of[…]
But even though Jesse (Elle Fanning) is “everything” right now, what she has is fragile: the aura of enchantment so prized by fashion is easily lost. Once she stops looking[…]
I have yet to encounter anybody who feels my fierce outrage at Scottie’s unfairness toward the necklace. That object is all-important, not because it is the vital clue to the Madeleine-is-Judy[…]
