By Ken Hall. The journey undertaken by Captain Kidd (Tom Hanks)…through Texas causes him to pass through ‘alien territory’ in a double sense. He is not closely acquainted with some of the locales which he encounters nor with the routes to those locales. Perhaps more important is the underlying strangeness of the […]
The Rules of the Game: Laura Wandel’s Playground
By Christopher Sharrett. Wandel has us pondering a crucial concern: is education predicated on patriarchal-capitalist ideology, as would seem most obvious, or do we confront, at this level of human development, some inherent savagery in the species (a problem with ‘human nature’)?” I was very happy to read on this […]
The Fever Dream of Werner Herzog’s The Twilight World
A Book Review Essay by John Duncan Talbird. Although Hiroda Onoda [as a central character in Werner Herzog’s debut novel] doesn’t carry any of the toxicity of many of Kinski’s roles – misogynist, racist, sense of entitlement, viciousness – he does have what nearly all of Herzog’s characters have, the […]
Counterfeit Money: Jean-Luc Godard’s The Great Swindler (aka The Confidence Man, 1964)
By James Slaymaker. The Great Swindler deserves to be recognised as a major work that sheds light on Godard’s attitude towards technology, critical reflexivity, and the shortcomings of the classical documentary mode.” Considered as a whole, Jean-Luc Godard’s filmography may be read as a reflexive historiography of the transforming technologies […]
The Real Genius: What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? by Joseph McBride
By Tony Williams. Despite McBride’s fortune in having a closer involvement with Welles than most critics, this book is never reverential. Instead, it presents a balanced and complex picture of an extremely talented but difficult personality whose personal flaws are less important than what he attempted to achieve.” What Ever […]
Unpredictable Moments: An Interview with Bijaya Jena on Abhaas (1997)
By Anees Aref. We all are sometimes weak and sometimes strong. I wanted to express how a moment of weakness can shatter your life.” Written and directed by Bijaya Jena, Abhaas (1997) has recently been restored after an initially challenging run finding distribution upon its first release. Set in 1950s […]
Norse Mythology, Repackaged: Ragnarok (Netflix, 2020- )
By Kenneth E. Hall. While not presuming a knowledge of Norse mythology, for those viewers already more versed in Norse myth the series offers a fresh approach to the corpus surrounding the apocalyptic event known as Ragnarok, employing a mix of magical realist and more traditionally fantastic techniques to unfold […]
The Once and Future Vertov: Dziga Vertov’s The History of the Civil War Restored by Nikolai Izvolov (1921/2021)
By Tony Williams. Thanks to the work of Russian archivist and film historian Nikolai Izvolov, both films are now available so viewers can see key examples of early Vertov made well before his celebrated documentary work and that contain glimpses of its legendary Kino Eye brand of documentary filmmaking.” It […]
The Agony and the Ecstasy: Jackass Forever
By James Slaymaker. How does an individual cope with growing old when they have become known to the world as an eternal child? This is the question that dominates Jerry Lewis’s late features, and it just as accurately describes the paradoxical combination of juvenile exhilaration and world-weary fatigue at the […]
Notes on “The Women Behind Hitchcock”
By Robert K. Lightning. Seeking to identify signature elements in Joan Harrison’s and Alma Reville’s work but also intertextual correspondences between their independent work and their collaborations with Hitchcock….” In August of 2021, New York’s Film Forum resumed its pre-closure series “The Women Behind Hitchcock”, a series devoted to examining […]