By Jon Kraszewski. Coming at the end of a film series that had degenerated into useless portraits of cartoonish characters and simplified visions of social issues, the 2006 film Rocky Balboa probably attracted very little attention from progressive film critics. I, admittedly, decided to watch it to indulge my fondness […]
The Mother’s Role in Bergman’s Persona
January 20, 2014
By Terence Diggory. CONTENTS The Critical Audience Dramatis Personae Child’s Play Alma Mater Sons and Lovers Fear of Lying Fear of Dying The Primary Audience The Critical Audience Ingmar Bergman saw the first hints of a new film as “a brightly colored thread sticking out of the dark sack of […]
True Love, Pride, and Passion: Re-viewing Stephen Frears’s Dangerous Liaisons (1988)
January 13, 2014
By Lesley Brill. In Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses (most of the plot of which Frears’s Dangerous Liaisons follows faithfully), love and passion dominate religion until the end. Concluding his epistolary novel, however, Laclos sends Cécile de Volanges back to the convent to become a nun and visits […]
One-Location Films and How They Achieve Their Success
January 5, 2014
By Victoria Tickle. One-location (or one-room) films are films that do exactly what they say on their metaphorical tins: their narratives take place within the confines of one location or one room. In order to compensate for their lack of locations, settings and (potentially) character interactions, one-location films have to […]
Our Children, or the Importance of Medea
December 21, 2013
By Christopher Sharrett. Joachim Lafosse’s Our Children (Á perdre la raison, a.k.a. Loving without Reason, a much more sensible title) put me in mind of Catherine Corsini’s Leaving (Partir, 2009), in part because both films represent the continued promise of the international cinema during the US cinema’s ongoing willed bankruptcy […]
The Invisible Cinema of Marcel Hanoun
November 24, 2013
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. “With poor and derisory resources, with the help and goodwill of those who have worked with me, I have been able to make my films. I have stolen them, torn them from a place in the shadows rarely offered to the Public, forbidden. My films have […]
The Noir Vision of Max Ophüls, Romantic Fatalist
November 14, 2013
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Max Ophüls, born Maximillian Oppenheimer on 6 May 1902, Saarbrücken, Germany, was a director known primarily for his romance films, often with sweeping tracking shots, and often taking place in the past. Ophüls’ luxurious camera style is evident in such superb romance films as Letter from […]
1970s Rape-Revenge Films and their Remakes: Changing Representations
November 8, 2013
By Victoria Tickle. Rape-revenge films are a controversial sub-genre of films that have been the subject of many critical debates surrounding feminism, moral issues and ethics, as well as the representations of women, violence and gender roles. Rape-revenge films are often categorised as a sub-genre of other larger and more […]
The Archaeology of Abjection in The Exorcist
October 31, 2013
By Will Dodson. Warner Home Video released a new Blu-ray set of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist on October 8, coinciding with the film’s 40th anniversary. The occasion warrants, I think, a brief revisiting. The set repackages an earlier Blu-ray edition with some new, inconsequential documentary features. Like the earlier release, […]
Light From the Screen: Cinema, Painting and Spectatorship
October 29, 2013
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Noël Coward once observed that “television is for appearing on – not for looking at,” but as the twenty-first century takes firm hold of our collective consciousness, it seems that everyone has become, in one form or another, a spectator of the events of everyday existence, […]