By Sara Saljoughi. [Editor’s note: This essay is published here in conjunction with the publication of Film International 69, vol. 12, no. 3/2014, a special issue devoted to Contemporary Independent Iranian Cinema.] The cinema of Jafar Panahi highlights two crucial strains of the problematic of Iranian independent cinema: the conditions […]
The Malick Illusion: Perceptual segmentation in The Thin Red Line
By Luis Antunes Rocha. “The image, in terms of sound, always has the basic nature of a question. Fundamental to the cinema experience, therefore, is a process – which we might call sound hermeneutic – whereby the sound asks where? and the image responds here!” (Altman 1980: 74) “With the […]
Toward the Limit: Michael Bay’s Transformers: Age of Extinction
By Carol Vernallis. Michael Bay poses a problem. He is the second-highest-grossing director, after Spielberg, so it’s not surprising that critics and connoisseurs love to take him down. But neither supporters nor detractors have been able to say exactly what he does. Is he just good at making Hollywood blockbuster […]
Santo in the Museum of the Mexican Film Industry
September 8, 2014
By John Burns. It seems that a number of historians and critics of Mexican film would be happier if the films starring lucha libre wrestler Santo had never been produced. One British university’s website on Mexican cinema called the Santo films “invariably stupid.” In Carl J. Mora’s exhaustive study of […]
A World of Constant Peril: Seriality, Narrative, and Closure
September 2, 2014
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. What are we watching now at the movies, or on television or Netflix for that matter?[1] Serials – though now they’re called franchises, or mini-series, or “cable dramas,” but they have the same structure, and the same limitations, the same narrative predictability. What will happen, for […]
Nixon – Oliver Stone’s Rough Beast Slouching
September 2, 2014
By Tony Williams. Like most of his films, Oliver Stone’s Nixon (1995) generated considerable critical debate usually emphasizing questions of historical accuracy and biographical depiction. However, unlike JFK (1991) and Natural Born Killers (1994), it received poor box office returns. Nixon not only represented Stone’s decision to change his usual […]
Netflix and National Cinemas
August 24, 2014
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. This article caught my attention about a week ago, and though I blogged on it then, it seems important enough to me to warrant further exploration. Under the headline “Netflix Will Rip the Heart Out of Pre-Sale Film Financing,” Schuyler Moore wrote in Forbes that: “Netflix is […]
Vindication of an Heiress: Surprise revelation, alienation effect, and screen persona in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
August 18, 2014
By Robert K. Lightning. Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956) was Fritz Lang’s final U.S. film.[1] In several obvious ways it can be read as a companion piece to the film that preceded it, While the City Sleeps. Both films star Dana Andrews as a reporter-turned-novelist. Both narratives also involve a […]
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia: Peckinpah the Dramatist
July 8, 2014
By Christopher Sharrett. The label “master of violence” was long ago affixed to director Sam Peckinpah. Books on Peckinpah with titles like “Bloody Sam,” and studies comparing the director’s films to Kubrick’s icy-cold vision in A Clockwork Orange, insist that we separate uses of violence – an element of drama […]
Multicultural Middle-earth: Constructing “Home” and the Post-colonial Imaginary in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings
June 30, 2014
By Laura Crossley. “The nation of course is not a desiring person but a fictive unity imposed on an aggregate of individuals, yet national histories are presented as if they displayed the continuity of the subject-writ-large.” (Shohat and Stam 1994: 101) When writing The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien […]