Features

By Heather Hendershot. One week after Donald Trump’s inauguration, Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here reached the #9 position in book sales on Amazon. Brave New World held the #15 slot. Sales also spiked for Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. At the same time, according to Penguin USA, sales of 1984 increased by […]

A Book Review Essay by Tony Williams. Many decades ago I heard a comment made by a respected scholar, and affirmed by a graduate student whom he later hailed as England’s greatest film critic, concerning the merits of destroying all films that did not live up to any canonical cinematic […]

by John Andrew Gallagher. Tay Garnett and and writer Howard Higgin spent the months of February and March, 1930 on Catalina Island writing Her Man, sharing a house with Lewis Milestone, who was working on the script of All Quiet on the Western Front with George Cukor, George Abbott, Del […]

By Christopher Weedman. The Criterion Collection deserves to be commended for their continued efforts to bring greater attention to the underappreciated films of director Ermanno Olmi. It is regrettable that, over the past fifty years, this Italian filmmaker’s deeply humanist oeuvre has largely lived in the critical shadows of the […]

By Christopher Sharrett. Readers will note that my title derives from essays and certain phrases by Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, D. H. Lawrence, Robin Wood, and Andrew Britton. I in fact stole it from Leavis, and will risk pomposity. In no way would I claim that […]

By Brandon Konecny. It has been suggested, sometimes by Moldovan film professionals themselves, that cinema does not currently exist in the Republic of Moldova, Europe’s poorest and perhaps least known country. At first blush, we might feel inclined to accept this assertion. After all, Moldova’s cinema was virtually nonexistent in […]

By Orville Lloyd Douglas. Black people are still mentally enslaved; even in the 21st century there is a psychic need by some Black artists to seek white approval and acceptance. The universal acclaim of the independent film Moonlight is due to white film critics, most heterosexual. Black films are made […]

By Tony Williams. As I write, hours tick away for the latest unimportant event in film history – the Hollywood Academy Awards which will have millions glued to their television sets totally unware both of its worthless significance and the nauseating spectacle of a meritless institution narcissistically patting itself on […]

By Christopher Weedman. The past couple of months have been full of rich rewards for admirers of the late Abel Gance. This brilliant and innovative French film director enriched the visual vocabulary of the early cinema with his silent spectacles J’accuse (1919), La Roue (1923), and Napoléon (1927), which were […]