By Tony Williams. On initial release, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Un Flic (1972) disappointed many and has remained in critical limbo to the present day. Despite growing appreciation of its visual style, the reasons why the director adopted such an ambiguous and seemingly incoherent approach still remain mysterious. Any film that followed […]
Stand, Men of the West! The Battle for Middle-earth (and Britain)
By Laura Crossley. “You’ve enjoyed the film, so now what are you going to do about the message? Tolkien didn’t just write The Lord of the Rings for fun, you know. He wrote it to inspire people, to make people understand that – faced with bad government and threats to […]
Radical Film-Making and Digital Paradox: the case of The Fourth Estate
By Elizabeth Mizon and Lee Salter. Digital media technologies are full of paradoxes. On one hand they are said to open up new opportunities, a “democratisation” of media, but on the other they are said to consolidate not just media power, but also the ideological frameworks that constrain critical creative […]
The Trials of Love, Justice, and Prejudice: Tom Hanks and Jonathan Demme’s film Philadelphia
By Daniel Garrett. In the film Philadelphia (1993), written by Ron Nyswaner and directed by Jonathan Demme, the actor Tom Hanks is impressive for being able to incarnate several perspectives in one man – states of health and malady, youth and sudden age, but also the public and private man, […]
On the Trail of Missing Millions in Emerging Europe: What Happened to a Fortune in Slovenian A/V Rights Due to Artists and Producers?
By Noah Charney. Branko Djuric, who goes by the nickname Djuro, is one the biggest film and television stars of the former Yugoslavia. His repertoire includes fistfuls of films, popular TV series, plays and even albums, spanning decades, so he is entirely used to receiving royalty statements and checks each […]
The Site of Nature: Exteriority and Overexposure in The Thin Red Line
By Trevor Mowchun. “Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts? The world is emblematic.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature) There is a sense in which it could be said that the natural world is beyond […]
In Defense of Hitchcock and Serious Criticism
By Robert K. Lightning. “It follows that the critic should read without inappropriate bias. We cannot properly object to The Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, because we think that John Bunyan’s theology is false: it is not a valid criticism of a work that it disagrees with the critic. What we […]
Humanities in the Digital Era
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. We live in the age of the visible invisible; everything is supposedly available to us online, but in fact, only a small fraction of the knowledge and culture of even the most recent past is available on the web. The digitization of our culture is now […]
The Fault in Our Films: Hollywood and the Illness Narrative
By Sheana Ochoa. Anyone who has watched the scene in the trailer of The Theory of Everything when Stephen Hawking’s character pulls himself up a staircase knows the film is a heavy hitter. Atop the stairs a robust, healthy baby curiously stares down at his helpless father in a macabre […]
The Babadook: Ghosts in the Bedroom
By Christopher Sharrett. Australian filmmaker Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook is last season’s fascinating, much-discussed contribution to the horror film, a genre that has fallen on hard times in the last quarter-century. I find the film engaging, although my enthusiasm is qualified. It is incoherent at the narrative and ideological levels, […]