By Jeremy Carr. All involved on this set from Arrow Video make a strong case for how remarkably varied and complex these movies were, from the economic, political, and social conditions of their making to the thrilling end results.” If the casual moviegoer is even remotely aware of the Shaw […]
The Prison House of Privilege: Pablo Larrain’s Spencer
By Christopher Sharrett. A portrait of female disintegration to a point that [the film] has been termed a horror film, an extreme designation, but not wholly inaccurate.” I saw Spencer at its opening, but I’ve waited to comment on it until I could view it carefully on Blu-ray, such is […]
Populist Fables: Law and Order and The Beast of the City
By Geoff Mayer. The below is excerpted from Hollywood’s Melodramatic Imagination: Film Noir, the Western and Other Genres from the 1920s to the 1950s (McFarland Publishers) by Geoff Mayer. All rights reserved. While sensational melodrama is structured as a fundamental bipolar clash between moral absolutes, the specific moral, political and […]
What is and What Could Have Been: Alien 3 – Gibson’s Screenplay, Cadigan’s Novel, Fincher’s Film
By Jeremy Carr. Alien 3’s tumultuous genesis and the abundant what-could-have-beens have left many fans of the Alien series to wonder how else the picture could have materialized. Providing one of the more compelling cases is William Gibson’s unmade screenplay….” There was little doubt that whatever came next would have […]
Rose-Tinted Glasses – The Beatles: Get Back
By Christopher Sharrett. Peter Jackson’s new documentary, The Beatles: Get Back, culled from fifty hours of film left over from the 1970 film Let It Be…tends to make [their breakup] rosier than it was, with the band in a mostly kindly mood but for a couple of nasty scrapes.” The […]
The Imperialists are Still Alive!: Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch
By James Slaymaker. Anderson is evidently not without talent, but he has continuously proven to be content to rest on his laurels…. The French Dispatch ultimately amounts to nothing more than hollow juvenilia.” Towards the end of Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, a group of staff writers, illustrators and other […]
The Peckinpah Masterpiece that Never Was: Major Dundee (Arrow Video)
By Tony Williams. Major Dundee dissects the soul of a particular form of dangerous American ambition taking short cuts, left and right, to achieve its aims.” The films of Sam Peckinpah are as controversial as the director’s personality, especially the problematic question of Major Dundee (1965). Was this a possible […]
Eyes Wide Shut: The Legacy of Abu Ghraib in Paul Schrader’s The Card Counter
By James Slaymaker. The final act of retribution may not have any longstanding effect on the military-industrial complex, but Tell has, at least, committed himself to one, concrete action which he knows to be just.” In the opening sequence of The Addiction (1995), Abel Ferrara’s deeply chilling existential horror film […]
The Velvet Underground: Mourning a Lost Bohemia
By Christopher Sharrett. I very much recommend Haynes’s film, but, [f]or me at least, it’s a reminder of all that has disappeared….” Todd Haynes’s new film The Velvet Underground has an obvious place in the filmmaker’s oeuvre; it connects to his early film Poison (1991) and much that followed, films […]
Steve Neale: Interrogating Cinema
By Frank Krutnik. Renowned for his groundbreaking work on genre, Neale has also made key interventions into other areas of film and media criticism…. [He] is not afraid to challenge critical orthodoxies, but does so not in a grandstanding manner but with a persuasive equanimity that invites us to rethink […]