Body Horror · Horror · Mumblecore · Romance
Not only does May challenge the tropes of mumblecore and indie-rom com movies, but it also retells elements of Frankenstein, offering a female protagonist who is both monster and monster-maker.[…]
Hinting at women’s complicity in a film plotted around men’s violent treatment of women is, well, ballsy. That Cregger’s script doesn’t delve into the larger cultural conditioning and structures that[…]
Actors & Personalities · Artists
Editor’s Note: Richard Pryor died on this date, December 10, 2005, ten days after his sixty-fifth birthday. We salute this comic genius and cultural game-changer by reposting Julian Upton’s powerful[…]
Drama · Eco · Eco-horror · Essays
What does a scar tell us about a person? Where they’ve been, what they’ve been through, the style in which they conduct their lives. A scar is a reminder, an[…]
Brigadoon is a quasi-origin story that is closely associated with the way stories transform the reality of the recent past. Communities, societies, and nations survive by means of having sacrificial[…]
Just as Holy Motors simultaneously mourned the loss of physicality from filmmaking while embracing the creative possibilities offered by digital technology, Annette is built on a seeming paradox: it plunges[…]
Actors & Personalities · Hollywood · Politics
If only Ronald Reagan had been a better actor, our world might be a brighter place today. * * * Although it’s been thirty-three years and six presidents since Ronald[…]
At last, seduction: the festival ended on a crescendo with Ennio, Giuseppe Tornatore’s expansive yet intimate tribute to the great Morricone. This is no superficial primer: Tornatore edits the film[…]
Exploitation & Erotica · Impresarios & Moguls
Mom and Dad is likely the most successful exploitation movie ever, and it still offers a lesson in the facts of, well, not life but canny American entrepreneurialism, that is,[…]
Lester D. Friedman. Citizen Spielberg. 2nd ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2022. $24.95. Calling him “our foremost practitioner of reel American history,” Friedman draws our attention to Spielberg’s determination[…]
#MeToo · Animation · Animators · News · Production History · Societal Trends
Docter and Lasseter were part of the Pixar Braintrust, a group of aging white men that held creative control of Pixar’s productions. The original members – Lasseter, Docter, Andrew Stanton[…]
Drama · Eco · Eco-horror · Horror
I’ve detailed each film to convey the strange and strict extent to which they each cohere to one base fear: reproductive control. The only hope for human survival in Phase[…]
Absurdism · Comedy · Drama · French Cinema · Mystery · Psychology
The question becomes: is it worth trying to be free? Is the struggle fruitless? Why can’t we escape our servitude to the past, to society, to others? * * *[…]
Eco · Horror · SF & Fantasy
In his creation of a nonhuman cinematic world that mines horror from its confrontation of human fear of irrelevance and inadaptability, Bouwer ultimately suggests that survival in the era following[…]
David Fincher’s Zodiac: Cinema of Investigation and (Mis)Interpretation, edited by Matthew Sorrento and David Ryan. 259 pp. Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2022. 2007 was a good year for American film, with[…]
Actors & Personalities · Dance · Dancers · Hollywood · Music & Musicals
He is transfixing just walking across the screen in his first movie, Dancing Lady (1933), where he partners Joan Crawford and looks as if he could fly if he wanted[…]
Crime · Gothic · Horror · Melodrama · Photo Essays
Franju demonstrates how beauty hides pain, until pain becomes beautiful. * * * Georges Franju’s Les yeux sans visage/Eyes Without a Face is a reliably haunting film, a beautiful nightmare[…]
Experimental & Underground · Religion & Spirituality · Women in Film
The volition of these dancers is as clear as the sense that it is not their own. Deren mirrors this depersonalization masterfully; her camera splits a man between his reflections,[…]
Absurdism · Comedy · Directors
Ethan and Joel Coen have shared writing, directing, and producing credits on their collaborations until their recent hiatus from working together. Here they are on location for their 2004 comedy[…]
Books · French Cinema · Thrillers & Action
Gemma King, Jacques Audiard. Manchester University Press, 2021. * * * In the first book-length exploration of the controversial director’s filmography, part of Manchester University Press’s French Film Directors series,[…]
