Review

By Jeremy Carr.  The holdup that begins the 1972 film Across 110th Street pits a trio of low-level amateurs against an established, well organized and, up to this point, efficient group of professional criminals. The end game is a case full of money, but what is ultimately achieved, more than […]

A Book Review By Carmen Siu. One hundred and eighty years young, the city of Toronto has a lot to boast about. ‘T-Dot’ is celebrated as a world-class city for its unique cultural diversity; vibrant music, film and literary scenes; and even, at times, its sports teams. But you’re more likely […]

By Christopher Sharrett. I was far more impressed than I thought I might be with Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher, a compelling film at various subtle yet complex levels. I should say first that as a person who spent his early life in Southeast Pennsylvania, I recall the John du Pont murder […]

By Chris Neilan.  Between 1945 and 1957 Greek born Elia Kazantzoglou had no directorial equal in Hollywood. The films he made in that period were nominated for fifty Oscars, twelve of those for A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), and launched the careers of Marlon Brando and James Dean. It was […]

A Book Review by John Duncan Talbird. In his 1968 study The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, Andrew Sarris wrote that Samuel Fuller was an “authentic American primitive,” to mean, I assume, that Fuller, like primitive painters, was untrained. It’s true that Fuller didn’t work his way up on the set […]

By William Repass.  In Damien Chazelle’s new film Whiplash (2014), aspiring jazz drummer and conservatory freshman Andrew (Miles Teller) and his father (Paul Reiser) meet at the cinema to enact their moviegoing father-son ritual. Both characters are white. Andrew buys a bucket of popcorn and a box of Raisinets from […]

By James Teitelbaum. Near the end of The Missing Picture, director Rithy Panh’s grim memoir of life under the Khmer Rouge regime in 1970s Cambodia, we see a clay figure representing a middle-aged Panh in repose within a detailed diorama of a psychiatrist’s office. This of course is a reminder […]

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Godard called his masterwork Weekend (1967) “a film lost in the cosmos – a film found on the scrapheap” in that movie’s intertitles, but at least it opened in a theater in New York, played there for months, and then made the rounds on the university […]

By John Duncan Talbird. No person looks into the camera in a Frederick Wiseman documentary. Some critics use the term cinéma vérité to describe his type of filmmaking, but Wiseman rejects this label. He says it suggests a guy showing up and hanging around, filming whatever happens to be there. […]

By Forrest Cardamenis. In what may prove to be Interstellar’s most memorable scene, Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper (that’s a last name; curiously, he is never given a first) is transported into a teserract in which time is physically navigable. While there he tells TARS, a helpful robot who has been with […]