The Return of Repression: How Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook Undoes Itself
The Babadook presents a normative vision of what it believes is a stable, happy existence, one in which if our emotions are difficult to bear, we simply lock them in[…]
What It Says About The New Republic If They Don’t Understand Horror Films
The continuing attention being showered on Jennifer Kent’s 2014 The Babadook from horror luminaries such as Stephen King and William Friedkin has prompted some impressive critical writing, while simultaneously anchoring[…]
“I Never Felt So Much Like Christmas in All My Life”: Why You Should Make a Date with The Man Who Came to Dinner
Sometimes, the personal angle offers the clearest view. Now and then, the authorial “we” must be abandoned in favour of a more open-handed, first-person approach. Therefore, I’ll begin by saying[…]
Home Is Not Just for Christmas … or Thanksgiving … or Middle-Class Chaps, However Decent
To be clear, The Holly and the Ivy is not mistakable for a lost gem from Renoir or Mizoguchi. Yet it does make the most of a story told “in[…]
The Melancholy of Alex Proyas: Seeking Transcendence in an Epicurean Age
Introduction This essay uses The Crow, Dark City, and Knowing to trace director Alex Proyas’ repeated thinking through of a philosophical problem using a stock of images that derives from[…]
Directors · Film Technology & History · Historical & Epic · Pre-Code · Religion & Spirituality · Silents
The Wickedest Movie in the World: How Cecil B. DeMille Made The Sign of the Cross
This post was adapted from the new book by Cecilia de Mille Presley and Mark A. Vieira, Cecil B. DeMille: The Art of the Hollywood Epic (Running Press, 416pp, December[…]
Activist & Political · African American · Directors · Reviews
Radio Raheem Is a Broken Record: Lessons from Do the Right Thing on Its 25th Anniversary
“Do the Right Thing ends the morning after Radio Raheem’s death, but we have enough details to know how the rest of the narrative will play out. Radio Raheem was[…]
Essays · Experimental & Underground · Silents · Sound & Language
Tomatoes Another Day: The Improbable Ideological Subversion of James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber
“Though standard critical appraisals would deem Tomatoes a deliberately crude affront to modern technical sophistication, it is itself the sophisticated artifact, its small rebellion resonating more strongly in a media[…]
Comedy · Crime · Sound & Language
Sound, Music, and the Verbal MacGuffin in American Hustle (2013)
American Hustle is, foremost, a film about appearances, about what is real and the constant dialogue between the diegetic and the extra-diegetic, which is especially compelling at the level of[…]
Hearts of Darkness, Lights of Madness: Herzog: The Collection (16-Film Blu-ray Collection)
I decided to review this massive collection as some kind of masochistic indulgence, and truly it’s been a long, soul-warping, awe-inspiring yet deeply troubling, at times maddeningly boring, 25+ hours[…]
A Pessimist’s Puzzle, or The Ambiguity of Ida
A respectable and due measure of column inches has been devoted to Pawel Pawlikowski’s latest film, Ida, but as the director himself has intimated, much of it has concentrated on[…]
American Dreamers: Badlands’ Kit Carruthers and Holly Sargis
“Certainly Kit’s story, like that of Charles Starkweather and indeed, that of Warshow’s gangsters, will end in his solitary demise, precisely because his actions have set him apart from others.[…]
Directors · Exploitation & Erotica
Pure Auteurness: Bert I. Gordon in the BIG World
What better way to celebrate Halloween than with Bert I. Gordon, budget-compromised auteur of War of the Colossal Beast, Earth vs. the Spider, Picture Mommy Dead, Empire of the Ants,[…]
Spectacular Belief: On Mark Pellington’s I Melt with You (2011)
“The notion that four nineteen-year-olds pledge to kill themselves if they, in essence, grow up, and then having grown up discover that adult life is nothing but misery and so[…]
Everything Is Marvellous, but without Superbeings, what does that even mean?
When space seems polluted with far too many Superbeings, maybe cinema is not the first place to go for relief. Yet for those who have not given up looking for[…]
Actors & Personalities · DVD & Blu-ray · Silents
Blu-ray Review: Recent Silent Film Releases from Flicker Alley
Chaplin, Mabel Normand, Mack Sennett, Harry Langdon, W. C. Fields, Ben Turpin – the gang’s all here. Flicker Alley, a home video company founded in 2007, is not solely dedicated[…]
Activist & Political · Directors · Festivals & Awards
Red Carpets and Radicals: The Shadow of Reality at the Fifth Odessa International Film Festival (July 11-19, 2014)
The Fifth Odessa International Film Festival was destined to be unlike its previous editions. Only two months previously, Odessa suffered an unprecedented peak in civil violence with the death of[…]
Book Review: Allan Dwan and the Rise and Decline of the Hollywood Studios
Allan Dwan and the Rise and Decline of the Hollywood Studios, by Frederic Lombardi (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013, 370pp, $49.95 from the publisher’s website) Allan Dwan (1885-1981) was one of[…]
Activist & Political · Asian · Reviews
Introducing Kashmir: On Haider, Vishal Bharadwaj’s Riff on Hamlet
“Something is rotten in the state of Kashmir” – Improvising Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It has taken rather long for a feature film set in Kashmir to get critical acclaim for its[…]
Activist & Political · Essays · Horror · Reviews · SF & Fantasy
We Are Not Who We Are: Human Sacrifice, Philosophical Horror, and (Maybe) the End of the World
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part,[…]
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