African American · Documentaries · Place
The film could be described as “meditative,” but with an important twist: while the directors and Lashay guide the audience through a thoughtful and introspective process – making sense of[…]
Essays · Feminism · Women in Film · Work and Workplace
Sarah is a good astronaut because she is a mother, not in spite of it. And she is a good mother because she is a good astronaut. If Sarah were[…]
Counterculture · Music & Musicals · Noir
In noir, tales of wrongful accusation tend to play out on mean streets that reflect social inequalities, which at times do have a nasty way of tilting normally upright people[…]
Books · Theory · Work and Workplace
Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky, The Process Genre: Cinema and the Aesthetic of Labor. 2020. Duke University Press, $28.95. Watching someone work is hypnotizing. We might not always enjoy working, but something[…]
Directors · Theory · Writers & Critics
One of Assayas’s most ferocious articles he ever wrote (and also one of the most theoretical) attacks le cinéma publicitaire – a film aesthetic (associated in France with Jean-Jacques Beineix[…]
Biopic · Drama · Gothic · Mystery · Myth and Archetype · Psychology
“The opus begins in dying.” – James Hillman “Just as each Gothic tale is itself a dream and also a mirror showing the reader his mind, everything within these symbolic[…]
Activist & Political · Pandemic · SF & Fantasy
I can’t believe it took me almost four decades and living through a global pandemic to realize it, but in E.T., Elliott and his motley crew of rascals might well[…]
Costume Drama · Drama · Horror · Literature and Film · Women in Film
In transposing Rebecca, notice how Hitchcock’s camera attends to shadows – bisecting faces and bruising frames – to approximate du Maurier’s disorienting syntax and looming dread. Or watch as his[…]
Animation · Counterculture · Cyberpunk · Digital · Essays · New Genres
In refusing to be neither something different nor more of the same, Back to the Future II’s re-filming technique within the original via new VistaGlide technology offered – rather –[…]
Amelia has cultivated a fearful respect of Mr. Babadook. She is in control of him and feeds him worms from her garden. Instead of trying to exorcise the demon, she[…]
Directors · Documentaries · Experimental & Underground · Exploitation & Erotica · Memoir · Outsiders
As much as there remains some graspable appeal to each man’s video work – George’s comic personality and the humorous reckoning with his own legacy, and Carl’s peculiar brand of[…]
Actors & Personalities · Asian
The next step for a Hollywood that is coming to see the true potential of Dev Patel’s abilities is to let him shine in his own right, and in his[…]
Activist & Political · Animals · Drama
Although Babe was released a quarter-century ago, its critique of animal agriculture remains timely. Babe celebrates the “unprejudiced heart” of its eponymous piggy hero, who narrowly escapes becoming Christmas dinner[…]
By all accounts The Drop Edge of Yonder, or Zebulon as the script was titled, was truly one-of-a-kind, going way beyond the acid-western genre Wurlitzer helped create. In part we[…]
Dawn brings the forces of reason and order (ironic, in that the posse clearing away the few remaining dead are little more than trigger-happy, thrill-seeking rednecks, not the wise and[…]
Activist & Political · African American · Societal Trends
Fredric March stands alongside four other mid-century drum majors for civil rights during the 1943 national radio broadcast of “Race-Relations Sunday.” Left to right: concert soprano Dorothy Maynor, actor Canada[…]
Drama · Theory · Writers & Critics
Bazin would always harbor reservations about The Third Man, but, due to that film, Greene’s presence would continue to loom large in discussions of Orson Welles, who was, of course,[…]
I’m Thinking of Ending Things is, like so many stories, a story about a man masquerading as a story about a woman. Which ultimately makes me wonder why we need[…]
About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position. – W. H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux-Arts” (1940) “It’s also a film I cherish[…]
“We grow up, but do we ever forget how afraid of ourselves we are?” * * * The books parents protest about are the best at converting children into bookworms.[…]
