Features

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. It’s a commonplace thing to discuss the individual vision of filmmakers, on both a national and international level, and the names of Howard Hawks, John Ford, Quentin Tarantino, Jean-Luc Godard, Roberto Rossellini, Kenji Mizoguchi, John Frankenheimer, Fritz Lang, Dorothy Arzner, Agnes Varda and numerous other cinematic […]

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Mark Rutland: “What do you believe in?” Marnie Edgar: “Nothing.” (From Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie) Alfred Hitchcock is routinely regarded as one of the most profound and technically adept directors in the history of cinema, but I would argue that only the latter half of that statement […]

By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. Finally, a film about an older woman who has an affair, and doesn’t get punished by the narrative. How delightful! How unusual! It isn’t as if Bright Days Ahead (Les Beaux jours) is a masterpiece, but it does get a few things right and it is […]

By Christopher Sharrett. I did not see Scott Cooper’s Out of the Furnace during its initial run some months ago, in part because I thought little of Cooper’s Crazy Heart (2009), and anticipated, incorrectly, that the film would adapt Thomas Bell’s important (although not very distinctive) novel Out of This […]