By Elias Savada. Don’t be confused by the branding up front on this new live action/motion capture film from Steven Spielberg. “Disney’s The BFG” is just the way the mouse studio puts its mark on its global empire. That world now includes Giant Country, which may or may not be […]
F.W. Murnau’s Faust: A Dazzling Achievement in German Silent Cinema
July 1, 2016
By Jeremy Carr. There is the sense while watching the 1926 silent German masterwork Faust that director F.W. Murnau and company are showing off a bit. With a wealth of money at their disposal and a hefty allotment of time (an essentially unlimited budget, finally reaching a reported two million […]
True Accounts of a Classic: Behind the Scenes of Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly by Peter J. Hanley
A Book Review by Tony Williams. This handsome, beautifully illustrated, well-researched book of over 400 pages (from Il Buono Publishing) is another example of the valuable work done by individual talents outsides the institutional confines of an oppressively market-driven publishing industry. Currently available on various Amazon.com links, whether America, the UK or […]
Free State of Jones: Fumigating the Magnolia
By Christopher Sharrett. I often show students the opening credits and establishing sequence to David O. Selznick’s garish, appalling 1939 film about the Civil War and the Old South, Gone with the Wind. After the credits, we see a crawl that wistfully mourns a time of cavaliers and gentlewomen, of […]
English Gothic: Classic Horror Cinema 1897-2015 by Jonathan Rigby
June 27, 2016
A Book Review by Cleaver Patterson. In the Author’s Note introducing English Gothic – Classic Horror Cinema 1897-2015 – the newly updated edition of his comprehensive text on the British film industry’s contribution to horror cinema first published in 2000 – author Jonathan Rigby discusses the effect the popularity of […]
Curing the Soul of a Troubled World – The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble
By Elias Savada. Music and cinema are both universal languages. I can’t think of another film that blends the best of these audio and visual worlds into a most enjoyable adventure about mixed cultures and disparate lives that becomes the sum of much more than its parts. Morgan Neville, the […]
Close Encounters of the Angelic Kind: Here Comes Mr. Jordan on Criterion
June 25, 2016
By Tony Williams. Unlike previous DVDs I’ve reviewed, Here Comes Mr. Jordan is my first and highly pleasurable viewing of a film I’d often heard about but never seen. I also missed Warren Beatty’s 1978 re-make Heaven Can Wait, a title change made with that archetypal Hollywood mode of illogical sensibility […]
A World “Whit” Large: Barcelona on Criterion
By Elias Savada. During his initial foray into filmmaking back in the 1990s, Whit Stillman was being hailed as a conquering hero successor to such cinematic titans as Preston Sturges, Leo McCarey, and Ernst Lubitsch, the creators of witty comedies that are still enjoyable many decades after they were made. […]
The Real Underground: Jack Sargeant’s Flesh and Excess: On Underground Film
A Book Review by John Duncan Talbird. Jack Sargeant’s new book, Flesh and Excess: On Underground Film, is an exploration of a place, a time, a state of being, a culture, and a certain range of experiences, experiences which have not yet been fully charted because they probably never can […]
“Hello Darkness, My Old Friend”: Criterion’s Only Angels Have Wings
By Tony Williams. If Robin Wood once said on a DVD feature, “If you don’t like Marnie, then you don’t like Cinema”, any encounter with Hawks’s Only Angels Have Wings (1939) challenges any viewer in a similar manner. As Gerald Mast (105) wrote, the film serves as “a cutting edge […]