By Christopher Sharrett. When I first took note of the television series Madam Secretary (2014-), I assumed it was a sort of promotional piece for Hillary Clinton. It may indeed be this, but its connection to the real world is more substantial and significant, telling us a great deal, if […]
Guy Ritchie’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and the Politics of Escapism
By Richard Grigg. Director Guy Ritchie’s 2015 film The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is of course inspired by the U.S. television series of the same name, a program that was extraordinarily popular for a brief period in the mid 1960s in America and abroad. Taking its cue from James Bond in […]
An Ogre’s Hide: Samad and Foolad Zereh, the Ogre
By Ramin S. Khanjani. For many avid followers of Iranian cinema across the world, the experience of this national cinema justifiably doesn’t go much beyond recent works of festival fixtures such as Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi and now Asghar Farhadi. Now imagine seating these fans in front of a screen […]
Monstrous Gaze: The Quandary of Spectatorship in La dolce vita
September 28, 2015
By William Repass. In the thematic arc formed by Fellini’s body of work, La dolce vita (1960) can be said to represent a pivot: his first film in which various reactions—against a repressive Catholic milieu, against the formal and ideological constraints of Italian neo-realism—coalesce into a fully-realized counter-aesthetic, incontestable both […]
The Way, Way Back: An Appreciation
By Christopher Sharrett. Some months ago I saw The Way, Way Back (2013) and was taken by it enough to buy the DVD. It is a small film, yet ambitious, serious in its insights, and uncommon in its understanding of and sympathy for young people, its gentle portrayal of a […]
Peter Bogdanovich: The Comedy Smuggler
By James Knight. This August will see the US theatrical release of She’s Funny That Way, the latest feature from Peter Bogdanovich. Since his directorial debut in 1968, Bogdanovich has been a man who has lived cinema to its fullest, experiencing everything the medium has to offer. He’s been a […]
Mise-en-scène and the Rebirth of Film
By Tom Silva. Film is a living thing and so it faces an unending series of deaths. Like the mythic hero in Joseph Campbell’s magisterial book The Hero of a Thousand Faces, if film is to experience a long survival, it must be continually reborn. As Campbell wrote, it requires […]
Fair Game: Democratic Principle in Hollywood Romances, from Tracy and Hepburn to the Present
By Robert K. Lightning. Lovers that demonstrate both spiritual affinity and spiritual equality have long been popular in middle-class entertainment. Repartee has often expressed that equality: one thinks of Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Benedict, Austen’s Emma and Knightley, Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Rochester. Romantic relations defined by repartee are inherently democratic, […]
End of a Saga: Andrzej Wajda’s Wałęsa: Man of Hope
By Geoffrey Fox. The credits roll over a black-and-white newsreel of missiles and men parading before an austere Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow on the 52nd anniversary of the October Revolution. A leap in time and place, and we see as through a car window the sepia and rust-brown hulks and […]
Discovering Mary Pickford
By Tony Williams. The title of this article has a double meaning. It is primarily a reworking of that lavishly illustrated and meticulously researched 1999 publication Mary Pickford Rediscovered written by someone (Kevin Brownlow) who already knew her work and had the privilege of once meeting the 70 plus year-old […]