Features

By Christopher Sharrett. My recent viewing of Meredith Willson/Morton da Costa’s film The Music Man, for the first time in decades, forced me to reflect on my initial viewing (in 1962, the year of its release) with my parental family while I endured another insufferable summer vacation in Bennington, Vermont, […]

By Martin Mulcahey. Hollywood has not always been accepting of Latinas. Current stars Salma Hayek, Eva Mendes, and Penélope Cruz follow in the footsteps of trailblazing Dolores Del Rio. Celebrated as “The Princess of Mexico”, Del Rio was a star whose allure captivated legendary figures Orson Wells, Marlon Brando, Elvis […]

By Carmel Doohan. “Social realism, what the fuck is social realism?” Paddy Considine, Director of Tyrannosaur (Little White Lies- Oct 2011) The ‘social’ came from ‘socialist’. When the soon to be directors of the British New Wave (Karel Reisz- Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, Lindsay Anderson- This Sporting Life, Tony Richardson- […]

  By Omar Robert Hamilton. No form of art is as tied to reality as cinema. Though Hollywood would have us think differently, the fundamental element to making a film is to press record on a camera. From cinema verité to Avatar – the first step toward making a film […]

By Celluloid Liberation Front. ‘We don’t want to disrupt taxpayers from the benefit of cultural democracy, do we?’ (Museum Guard in Savage Messiah) British cinema lost with Ken Russell a vital antibody to its gangrenous pragmatism and aesthetic sclerosis. Russell’s imaginative exuberance has represented a refreshing if erratic presence within […]

By Ken Chen. Susan Sontag once called transparency – the luminousness of the thing in itself – the highest value in contemporary film. By this, she meant the way Renoir and Ozu remind us of life. What then should we make of the occluded films of Eugène Green, which invoke […]

By Gary Bettinson. In 1967, movie actor Warren Beatty assumed the mantle of producer with Bonnie and Clyde. His decision to harness greater production responsibility not only coincided with a pivotal shift in Hollywood’s history; it also contributed to this shift, establishing Beatty as a significant force in Hollywood’s changing […]

By Christopher Sharrett. It seems to me that Danish director Nicholas Winding Refn’s Drive (2011) is an important film (it is too soon to say if it is anything like a great one), at the very least for its sense of the fading, threatened male hero as a representation of […]

By Celluloid Liberation Front. “If the young are not initiated into the village, they will burn it down just to feel its warmth.” African proverb The recent urban unrest that shook the already shaky scaffoldings of English society – sugar-coated with viral advertising yet hardly reassuring – recurs at a […]

By Alexander Kirschenbaum. ‘Am I different somehow? Is it live or is it Memorex?’ (Seth Brundle [Jeff Goldblum] in David Cronenberg’s The Fly [1986]) For the purposes of this article, ‘metamorphosis cinema’ refers to a specific canon of 1980s-produced feature films that are about transitional physical states, about the grotesque […]