A Book Review by M. Sellers Johnson. While Diffrient advances contemporary television scholarship…readers will also find this book to be light, entertaining, and likely relatable to modern TV consumers’ apparent affinity for dubious moral ethics.” Within our televised small screens and the world they inhabit, bad behavior persists in social […]
The Lost Burlesque Auteur: The Films of Lillian Hunt
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. What remains so striking about Hunt’s films is how openly both they and their supporting promotional material clearly sought to appeal to a female audience, well beyond the cliché of the porn-consuming scopophilic male.” While American burlesque cinema flourished in popularity during in the 1940s and 1950s, […]
Tyranny and the Canon: Problems in Todd Field’s Tár
By Christopher Sharrett. As a way of addressing woke culture, it has precious little to say, especially as it irresponsibly conflates the culture with sexual predation, a glaringly different matter, unless the film is aimed at those with grievances about women having too much power…. There is so little music […]
Sonic Violence: Cinematic Rape, Sound, and the Body in Lipstick (Lamont Johnson, 1976)
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. Lipstick stands as a largely underrated film when it comes to the often complex representation of the male rapist in fictional film. Sound often plays second fiddle to the supremacy of the visual in cinema… yet as this example indicates, it can play a significant part in […]
Out to Pasture: Nicholas Winding Refn’s Copenhagen Cowboy (Netflix Series, 2023)
By James Slaymaker. A glacially paced revenge-thriller which deliberately denies the audience any sense of tension, excitement or catharsis.” It’s remarkable to think that a scant decade ago, Nicolas Winding Refn was tipped to be the next major player in international art cinema. The rapturous reception of Drive (2011) represented […]
Ruminations on the American Haunted House Genre – The Newest TV Additions are…Canadian
SurrealEstate (CTV Sci Fi, 2021- ) and Three Pines (Prime Video, 2022- ) * By Melanie A. Marotta. “Houses don’t kill people. People kill people.” –Armand Gamache, Three Pines (2022; episode 3) On October 25, 2022, the Syfy channel’s social media accounts posted a video of Tim Rozon (Luke Roman) […]
James Baldwin Abroad (and on Film)
By John Talbird. Love has never been a popular movement. And no one has ever wanted, really, to be free. The world is held together…by the love and passion of a very few people. Otherwise, of course, you can despair. You can walk down the street of any city…and look […]
Rebellion and Cataclysm: Dennis Hopper’s Out of the Blue (1980)
By Christopher Sharrett. Hopper’s is a surprisingly radical statement for a filmmaker known for his very inconsistent political thinking.” What to say about Dennis Hopper? In his day he could be a pain in the neck, publicly brandishing his neuroses, failures, and addictions – in the new Severin edition of […]
A Magnetic Mystery: David Lynch’s Lost Highway
By Jeremy Carr. Lynch at his storytelling best.” David Lynch can tell a pretty standard story when he wants to. While films like The Elephant Man (1980), Blue Velvet (1986), and The Straight Story (1999) surely have their moments of classically “Lynchian” eccentricity, their fundamental plots unfold along relatively orthodox […]
A Growing Influence – Hollywood in China: Behind the Scenes of the World’s Largest Movie Market
A Book Review Essay by Dina Iordanova. Author Ying Zhu reflects the changing fortunes of Hollywood in China and shows clearly that Chinese film culture can exist both with and without Hollywood.” In the fall of 2016 l had a two-month long stint as visiting professor at the Beijing Film […]