By Jeremy Carr. When he wasn’t genre hopping from Film Noir to Westerns to epic spectacles and war films, the perpetually underrated Anthony Mann was mixing conventions and mingling styles amongst more indefinable works. These were films like Reign of Terror (1949), The Tall Target (1951), Serenade (1956), and, perhaps […]
Missing in Action: The Lost Version of Vanishing Point
March 3, 2014
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Much has been deservedly written on Richard C. Sarafian’s existential road movie Vanishing Point (1971), a shambling, glorious wreck of a film that nevertheless manages to achieve a certain sort of ragged splendor in its countercultural tale of loner driver Kowalski (Barry Newman), who takes on […]
The Narcissistic Sociopathology of Gender: Craig’s Wife and The Hitch-Hiker, Part 1
March 2, 2014
By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. It’s instructive to study the work of Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino in context with one another. Though at first glance, one might easily conclude that the only thing they have in common is that they were the only women who managed to direct films during […]
Preliminary Notes on the Monochrome Universe
February 26, 2014
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Lately I’ve been thinking about black and white movies, and how they’ve almost completely disappeared from the current cinematic landscape.[1] There are occasional projects shot in black and white, but with cinema rapidly becoming an all-digital medium, and black and white film stock almost impossible to […]
The forced Real of (in)humanity: A brief Lacanian critique of The Act of Killing
February 24, 2014
By Mats Carlsson. Like all great documentaries, The Act of Killing demands another way of looking at reality. It starts as a dreamscape, an attempt to allow the perpetrators to reenact what they did, and then something truly amazing happens. The dream dissolves into nightmare and then into bitter reality. […]
Les Cousins (1959)
February 21, 2014
By Christopher Neilan. In 1958, twenty-seven year old cahiers du cinema critic Claude Chabrol spent his wife’s inheritance money shooting his debut feature Le beau Serge, a Hitchcock influenced morality piece starring Gérard Blain and Jean-Claude Brialy. The film, which earned the best director prize from the Locarno film festival, […]
“Illusion and Reality” Films: Genre and Apotheosis
February 18, 2014
By Brian Russell Graham. A great many of the most popular films of recent decades are characterized by a character’s struggle to separate illusory worlds from ordinary reality. Examples range from the Wachowskis’ The Matrix (1999) to Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of […]
America’s Acts of Killing: Robert Greenwald on Drone Wars
February 18, 2014
By Matthew Sorrento. Bizarre, shocking, yet filled with truth, Joshua Oppenheimer‘s The Act of Killing continues to gather acclaim. This Oscar-nominated record of routine killings of Communists in Indonesia during 1965-66 haunts viewers. As a filmed document about memory – the paramilitary gangsters (“free men”) discuss on camera how they […]
Autumn Sonata (1978)
February 15, 2014
By Jeremy Carr. “A mother and a daughter. What a terrible combination of feelings and confusion and destruction.” So says Eva (Liv Ullmann) toward the end of Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata (1978). More than any other line of dialogue, in what is a remarkably written film, this gets to the […]
Shackled (Belenggu): A Well-Mounted Disappointment
February 11, 2014
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. I wish I could say kinder things about this film, especially since it’s clear that this was a labor of love on the part of its director, Upi Avianto, an Indonesian genre filmmaker with numerous other films to her credit, such as Looking For Love in […]