Remembering Making The Things We Do for Love: A Cinemagic

By Andrew Repasky McElhinney. “Cinemagic” is a Magic Word Twenty years ago, late September 2006, my phone rang — it was Gina Renzi, the director of The Rotunda, where I curated a monthly screening series, Andrew’s Video Vault from 2003 to 2017. Gina’s breaking news was that UPenn had acquired […]

In Ripley’s Shoes: Anton Corbijn’s A Talent for Murder

By Thomas M. Puhr. Corbijn and company have crafted an engaging, surprisingly funny examination of how fiction allows you to experience the life or death (or sex, for that matter) you think you deserve.” Tom Ripley has become so ingrained in the cultural consciousness that even someone who has never […]

Peter Lorre, Rest in Peace

By Gary D. Rhodes. Peter Lorre’s flair for black comedy shines brightly, like a harvest moon casting dark shadows on All Hallow’s Eve…. Lorre lives, even in death.” What a wonderfully paradoxical title: The Comedy of Terrors (1963), one of Peter Lorre’s last films, and the very last to be […]

Anything is Everything: John Wilson’s The History of Concrete

By Thomas M. Puhr. It would be all-too-easy to criticize Wilson for both his scattershot approach and seeming off-the-cuff attitude… but a mandala-like design ties everything into a cohesive whole.” Dank water floods a gym locker room. A dog pukes from the window of a speeding car. A self-driving delivery […]

How Louise Brooks Came to Play Lulu: A New Look at a Legend

By Thomas Gladysz. For decades, it’s been said G. W. Pabst cast Louise Brooks in Pandora’s Box after having seen her in A Girl in Every Port. It’s an assertion repeated so often it has become fact, part of the legend which surrounds not only the acclaimed German film, but […]

From Sound to Observation: Shuntaro Uchida on Incinerator

By Yun-hua Chen. I felt that my job was to interfere with that as little as possible.” –Shuntaro Uchida Ten-year-old Kozue (Karin) feels out of place at school. She doesn’t have any peer to talk to and likes tossing randomly procured objects into the school’s incinerator. The university student Jinta […]

“It’s About Time”: Anja Breien’s Wives Trilogy

By Thomas M. Puhr. By turns funny, subversive, and formally playful, they are lovely paeans to female friendship.” A few years ago, I reconnected with a college friend on social media. Our online conversations were pleasant enough, but I felt a pang of anxiety when we set a date to […]