Why Are We So Obsessed with Tár?
Why would writer-director Todd Field make the character so eloquent, cast her with such a beloved actress, and spend so much screen time building pathos for her, all the while[…]
The Pearls of Pauline (Kael, That Is)
The little film critic who could sort of
Absurdism · Activist & Political · Counterculture · Crime · Experimental & Underground · Fairy Tale · Politics · Writers & Critics
Alice’s Evolution: Chicago 70 and the Revolutionary Awakening of Lewis Carroll’s Victorian Heroine
Abstract Interposing characters, dialogue, and symbols from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland into a contemporary political scenario – the Chicago 7 trial – Kerry Feltham’s experimental film Chicago 70 provides[…]
Directors · Essays · Genres · Horror
Sexual Violence and Female Experience in Roman Polanski’s Apartment Trilogy: Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, The Tenant
Roman Polanski was born August 18, 1933, making him 89 years old on this day in 2023. We mark the occasion – we won’t say celebrate – by republishing Elise[…]
Chasing The Front Runner
Future events in political campaigns came to be much worse than the events of late 1987 proved to be. One might be inclined to scoff at Gary Hart’s response given[…]
Horror · Mental Illness · Superheroes · Urban Conflict
Hollywood Art Flick: Joker as Social Commentary, an Origin Story
Joker is the “underman” we get when God and Superman have been killed and we still don’t know how to navigate our lives without them. He’s our secular Antichrist –[…]
Documentaries · Ethnographic · Indigenous
Captivating and Captive: Hunting and Taxidermy as Liminal Control in Nanook of the North
As a hunter, Nanook does more than simply violently kill animals. He is depicted as a master of his environment, forcing it (and the animals he hunts) to conform to[…]
Documentaries · Native Americans · War
Documentary Dispatch Tribeca: Irene Lusztig’s Richland
Thankfully, Lusztig resists the temptation to make old film segments salacious. There are no blooming mushroom clouds, no charred devastation. Richand is a movie about a small town with a[…]
Documentaries · Drama · Family
Documentary Dispatch Tribeca: Maria Fredriksson’s The Gullspang Miracle
The fourth wall is broken in the first moments of filming, and the opening scene sets up the dynamic between the filmmaker and the filmed. From there on out, Fredriksson[…]
Absurdism · Experimental & Underground · Indies
Beautiful Dreamers: Lost and Found in The Forbidden Zone (1978)
The Forbidden Zone was made simultaneously to David Lynch’s Eraserhead, and they indicate, even from the fringes of California filmmaking, a coming zeitgeist, soundings of something that wed the violence[…]
The “Holy Stuff” in Jack Clayton’s The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne
What makes Judith Hearne such a compelling portrait of female alcoholism is the novel and film’s attention to the many factors that drive Judith’s drinking – the initial encouragement of[…]
Directors · Drama · Family · Writers & Critics
Sweat the Technique: Spielberg’s Cinematic Künstlerroman, The Fabelmans, and Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Right before the unnerving camping incident, Sammy has been told by his uncle Boris, who once tamed lions used in movies, that art is a dangerous undertaking and that it[…]
Activist & Political · Documentaries · Eco · Festivals & Awards
Documentary Dispatch: Trip Jennings’s Reimagine Wildfire (2023)
This film is more than a wholesale indictment of political policy. It’s peppered with real stories of loss and near-disaster told by victims, firefighters, researchers, and native peoples who are[…]
Colonialism · Documentaries · India
Itinerant Maps: Sapna Moti Bhavnani’s Sindhustan Reimagines Partition History
The film reimagines mapmaking as a self-reflective and relational drawing practice manifesting in myriad narratives on the filmmaker’s skin. Bhavnani initiates a participatory process as she situates her tattooed designs[…]
Georges Méliès’s Dancing Clocks: On Cendrillon (Cinderella), 1899
There is the take on Cinderella where we ask our heroine to wait out her terrible circumstances, a moral that encourages us to work all day according to the clock[…]
Books · Directors · Writers & Critics
Pulp Nonfiction: Quentin Tarantino’s Cinema Speculation
It would be easy – and fun – to focus entirely on the good and to co-sign his [Tarantino’s] praise for films that are also favorites of mine such as[…]
African American · Animals · Drama · Hollywood · Surrealism
The Power of the Look: On Jordan Peele’s Nope
In this instance, the look is also a threat to those doing the looking. The act of seeing can be damaging not only to the target but also to the[…]
Drama · LGBT & Queer · Men & Masculinity · Westerns
Brotherly Love: The Fraternal Love Triangles of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Though the possible motivations behind Ford’s deep admiration for James have been a topic of debate since the film’s release, little attention, unfortunately, has been paid to the shared relationship[…]
Absurdism · DIY · Experimental & Underground · Horror
An Enraged Eye: Nathan Schiff’s Vermilion Eyes as Anti-Film
“I felt there was a dead end to the kind of films I was making. . . . I was losing sight of reason in favor of result and so[…]
Counterculture · Dialogue · Drama · Romance
Bringing Down the Establishment: The Graduate and End of the Road: A Dialogue
The subsequent dialogue between the two films developed after much negotiation and cajoling. They were inclined to be hostile to the other. I tried to inform them about their common[…]
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