By Johannes Schönherr. New York City, June 27th 1993: Notorious punk rocker GG Allin had finally served out a lengthy prison sentence in Michigan and was set to play his first concert after his release. The venue was a club called the Gas Station on the corner of East 2nd Street and […]
Working for the Police, Working for the City, or Selling Drugs: Stanley Corkin’s Connecting The Wire
August 11, 2017
A Book Review Essay by John Duncan Talbird. David Simon’s television series The Wire ran on HBO from 2002-2008, five seasons of a prestige show that, in the less than ten years since its last episode, has reached iconic status and is on most critics’ top-ten shows of all time lists. […]
The Indian Film Critics Have Done It Again!: Reading Gender in Ki & Ka Through the Cinematic Lens of R. Balki
August 9, 2017
By Devapriya Sanyal and Melissa Webb. The Indian film critics have done it again! As Glover and Kaplan state in their book Genders, the term “gender” itself is rather slippery. Such complicated issues regarding gender and performance are explored by Indian film director R. Balki, who attempts a gender role-reversal of sorts in his […]
The Year of the Kneale Olympics – Into the Unknown: the Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale by Andy Murray and We Are the Martians edited by Neil Snowdon
A Book Review Essay by Tony Williams. It is as if in movies, TV and books, genre progresses through a series of metaphorical prison walls. Inferior and derivative work merely scratches the surface, some not even that. But the giants – the geniuses and serious innovators – smash the walls […]
Facts are Not Stupid Things: Lessons from The Reagan Show
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 […]
Still More to the Story: I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang! by Scott Allen Nollen and Paul Muni by Michael B. Druxman
A Book Review Essay by Matthew Sorrento. It may be tempting to recommend Scarface (1932) or Little Caesar (1930) as a first viewing to newcomers of pre-Code. However, Mervyn LeRoy’s I Am A Fugitive from A Chain Gang! (1932) or the similarly powerful Wild Boys of the Road (William Wellman, […]
Master of Italian Gothic – Riccardo Freda: The Life and Works of a Born Filmmaker by Roberto Curti
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 […]
When Tay Garnett Met Frankie and Johnnie: Her Man (1930)
June 14, 2017
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 […]
The Roots of Social Change: Ermanno Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs on Criterion
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 […]
The Function of Film Criticism at Any Time
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 […]