A Review Essay by Tony Williams. Following the commercial success of The Dirty Dozen (1967), iconoclastic director Robert Aldrich fulfilled his dream of purchasing his own studio. As well as attempting full independence from the Hollywood studio system that he was both part of, and opposed to, the director aimed […]
Diverted Dreams: Astronaut (2019)
Jeremy Carr
July 26, 2019
By Jeremy Carr. Septuagenarian grandfather Angus (Richard Dreyfuss) has harbored dreams of space since he was a child. Although the waning years of his life have generally clouded those fancies, thanks to life’s bitter two-pronged tinge of disappointment and regret, he still looks to the stars in order to “see […]
Restoring Paul Leni – The Man Who Laughs (1928) and The Last Warning (1929) from Flicker Alley
Tony Williams
July 24, 2019
By Tony Williams. While we lament today current low standards represented by mainstream Hollywood cinema, those of us resilient enough to resist the temptations of the “new” and ignore the uneducated comments of ungrateful, social media-addicted 100-level students complaining about the fact that they have to see “old films” (despite […]
Deadites vs. Adaptation: Media and The Evil Dead
Valerie Guyant
July 18, 2019
By Valerie Guyant. The following is an excerpt from The Many Lives of The Evil Dead: Essays on the Cult Film Franchise, © 2019, Edited by Ron Riekki and Jeffrey A. Sartain by permission of McFarland & Company, Inc., Box 611, Jefferson NC 28640. www.mcfarlandbooks.com. Evil Dead has been adapted for different media, […]
All in the Method – Remembering British Television: Audience and Industry by Kristyn Gorton and Joanne Garde Hansen
July 9, 2019
A Book Review by Tony Williams. This recent monograph (Bloomsbury/BFI, 2019) aims to debate the importance of everyday TV memories involving academics, audiences, and fans, in terms of recent theoretical developments in the field of British television studies. It is an academic study in the full-sense of the term, one […]
Homage to Humanity: La vie de Jesus and L’Humanite (Criterion Collection)
Christopher Sharrett
June 19, 2019
By Christopher Sharrett. Bruno Dumont is one of the outstanding figures of the twenty-first century’s European cinema, so the Criterion hi-definition releases of his two early films, la vie de Jesus (1997) and l’Humanite (1999), are something of a godsend. I have written at length about Dumont on this site, so I’ll […]
DocuChronicles: Barbara Rubin and the Exploding NY Underground
June 17, 2019
DocuChronicles is a blog dedicated to independent documentary cinema by filmmaker Marjorie Sturm. It includes a mix of reviews, interviews, and longer pieces. By Marjorie Sturm. Barbara Rubin was an experimental filmmaker most known for the pulsating, sexually graphic “Christmas on Earth” that she shot when she was only eighteen. She was a […]
Transcending the Chains of Illusion – The Assassin: Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s World of Tang China, Edited by Peng Hsiao-yen
Tony Williams
June 12, 2019
A Book Review Essay by Tony Williams. In Mostly About Lindsay Anderson, his long-time friend Gavin Lambert speaks about the in-flight movie seen by his colleague that drove him to despair. Enduring Suspect (1987), Anderson experienced feelings similar to anyone watching The Jagged Edge (1984), the kind of bland made-for-TV movie that […]
Researcher Beware! – Frankly: Unmasking Frank Capra by Joseph McBride
June 8, 2019
A Book Review Essay by Tony Williams. Joseph McBride’s latest mammoth book, well-written and copiously documented as usual, is an unusual production in the field of cinema studies. It is a companion volume to his earlier 1992 text, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success, which took issue with the traditional estimation of […]
Reassessing Blue Velvet: a Criterion Collection Release
Christopher Sharrett
June 4, 2019
By Christopher Sharrett. I have had a difficult history with David Lynch’s breakthrough film Blue Velvet (1986), and for that matter, much of the director’s work. At first, I thought the film a good antidote to the “morning in America” claptrap that was a major feature of the Reagan era […]