Review

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

By Elias Savada. Unless you’re orbiting the art universe, particularly in the vicinity of its comically subversive galaxy, you’ve probably never heard of Robert Cenedella, who is both a bastard (in the biblical sense) and an artist (in a mostly mythological/fantastical off-the beaten-path way) in Art Bastard, a sprightly designed look […]

A Book Review by Matthew Fullerton. New Tunisian Cinema is a timely book, released three years after the revolution that toppled Ben Ali, the dictator under whom the directors featured in Robert Lang’s study worked for much of their careers. It focuses on eight oeuvres from New Tunisian Cinema, a generation […]

By John Duncan Talbird. A few years ago, I was with my wife in some Brooklyn hamburger joint waiting for our food. It was one of those places where you are given an electronic device that vibrates when your food is on the tray and ready to consume. My device […]