Review

By Anthony Killick. Owen Gower’s debut feature film offers a narrative of the 1984-85 miners strike, the loss of which has triggered three subsequent decades of neoliberal power consolidation. If history belongs to the winners, then this film proves that at certain points the winners will have to make concessions. […]

By Christopher Sharrett. For a number of years there has been considerable critical palaver about the “ambiguities” of Clint Eastwood’s ideology, with monographs and essays on the topic published at a regular pace. Eastwood himself once said “I do the stuff John Wayne would never do,” meaning he, as Old […]

By John Duncan Talbird. Writer-Director Desiree Akhavan’s funny and touching first film, Appropriate Behavior, is one of a type of smart, simple dramas that have appeared over the past few years: Rachel Getting Married (2008), Your Sister’s Sister (2011),  Frances Ha, and Celeste and Jesse Forever (both 2012) to name […]

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 […]