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January 11, 2019
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From volatile sibling relationships to House of Atreus–style depravity, traditional ideas about family were upended and replaced with a contemporary look at the complex, ever-expanding definition of the ties that[…]
In Sparrow, this sense of melancholia manifests as an abstract nostalgia for the architecture and cultural values of an old Hong Kong that is rapidly disappearing and being replaced by[…]
This brief essay will seek to answer the distinctions between mimetic and diegetic elements in a filmic text, isolate the voice-over as a unique event located between the strict division[…]
“All the things we should’ve said that I never said/ All the things we should’ve done that we never did/ All the things we should’ve given but I didn’t/ Oh,[…]
Snow White’s frailty isn’t her weakness or her fault. Disney saw the child in her, and loved it well enough to accentuate and nurture it. Today, we present children with[…]
Horror · Women in Film · Writers & Critics
Despite the fact that Wray had no previous screen credits, Lewton hired her to rework the story of I Walked with a Zombie with only two months to go before[…]
“The aesthetic features of post-horror replicate the mixture of shame, confusion, shock, and anxiety about the future experienced by liberal Americans in the midst of the Tea Party and Trump’s[…]
The characters’ fates are determined more by chance than by anything else, so pursuing justice in Unforgiven is about as futile as fighting an organized battle in Good Bad Ugly.[…]
“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[…]
