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December 10, 2018
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“There’s something that happened, and there’s a kind of ring around that event – or it’s fenced off – and everything else is okay around it, but there’s just something[…]
Actors & Personalities · Artists
Editor’s Note: Richard Pryor died on this date, December 10, 2005, nine days shy of his sixty-fifth birthday. We salute this comic genius and cultural game-changer by reposting Julian Upton’s[…]
It’s OK with Me: Hollywood, the 1970s, and the Return of the Private Eye, by Jason Bailey. $11.99, 78 pp. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2018. Across individual analysis of about[…]
Directors · Documentaries · Essays
I think that this delicate line between reality, and fact, and truth needs to be more clearly defined. We have to redefine reality.1 – Werner Herzog There are dignified stupidities.[…]
We worked to create a “slow film” aesthetic, with distinct moments where it broke from the rules. Paul planned to use boredom and duration as the method, with longer takes,[…]
Comedy · Counterculture · Drama
Everyone in Shampoo is id driven, with the audience taking voyeuristic pleasure at the absence of any self-awareness. George is inarticulate and largely passive, more preyed upon than preying with[…]
The Prince: “I haven’t yet had a report from your office. What’s your work like?” The Warden: “Every night the same. Every night till the heart beats as if it[…]
If there’s an authorial hand in Trier’s films, it serves only to pull the wings off the fly. * * * In the thirty-five-odd years he’s been active, Lars von[…]
Festivals & Awards · Women in Film
Rather than a fascist leader, in Vox Lux Celeste suggests a different sort of monstrosity – a receptacle for the nation’s horrors and fantasies, even more than a Madonna or a[…]
Some actors’ gestures are the equivalent of a great singer, dancer, or athlete achieving the heights of their profession. And the reason so many people respond to Ford’s films by[…]
Theirs is a passive outlook, young men products of a culture that for too many generations has grown to depend on a corporate entity, mistaking the mill for a permanent,[…]
The demon-summoning, LED laser-lens flares, medieval weaponry-fetishizing, churning synth and axe rhythms, and the overall simmer of curdling darkness are collective flickers of a recurrent, suffocatingly inescapable nightmare, one fueled[…]
Festivals & Awards · New Media
Francis Ford Coppola introduced the screening of his Robin Williams vehicle Jack. Since this was the Festival of Disruption, Coppola said he wanted to “disrupt” by screening his worst film,[…]
Mia: It feels really nostalgic to me. Sebastian: That’s the point. Mia: Are people going to like it? Sebastian: Fuck ’em. – La La Land * * * The popular[…]
Even more than in The River, with The Deserted we are sensually implicated in the small gestures of rest and relief, saving graces in this abandoned world. When Lee later[…]
Costume Drama · Literature and Film
The otherwise remarkably faithful adaptation, however, makes an incongruent turn when Scorsese reverses Wharton’s color casting of the two female protagonists by portraying Ellen Olenska and May Welland as blonde[…]
Activist & Political · African American · Counterculture
The stealthy campaign of subterfuge undertaken by Stallworth is only one possible stance of resistance. And in adopting such a form of civil disobedience, Stallworth aligns himself with a cultural[…]
Absurdism · Activist & Political · Philosophy
The film’s most problematic allegorical turn, however, is its subsequent and wholesale appropriation of Palestinian trauma. Despite the slaughter of four innocent Palestinians – by accident or not – Maoz[…]
Uncharacteristically, The Martian and Arrival do not present us with a problematic dystopian future with which to grapple; a future in which everything has always already gone wrong. Instead, they[…]
Look Back in Anger (Tony Richardson, 1959); The Entertainer (Tony Richardson, 1960); Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1960); A Taste of Honey (Tony Richardson, 1961); The Loneliness of[…]
Something hereditary is passed down to posterity, all without their foreknowledge or approval; an unborn child has no say in what color eyes it will have, what its allergies may[…]
Living disillusioned in a post-Brexit Instagram-filtered age, standing at the periphery of the job market in a state of horror as the surplus of impressive graduates wander by, it is[…]
Franchises & Series · SF & Fantasy
We could call Episode I the first of the modern “digital epics.” It is perhaps the single most influential film on today’s Hollywood, the film that introduced the concept of[…]
