By Paul Risker. Agnieszka Holland’s three part mini-series Burning Bush (2013) opens with a pictorial and musical energy that swings like a pendulum between freedom and oppression. Just as day and night are two fundamental ontological opposites, so too are these titanic forces. Holland infuses the show’s title sequence with […]
The Cold Lands, Cold Indeed
July 11, 2014
By Robert Kenneth Dator. In The Cold Lands prepare for inspired photography by Wyatt Garfield within which images old-growth forests appear like cathedrals; fields of golden rod and sage seem timeless; the blue shadows of the deep woods, in shade or under the silver breath of the moon, transform memory; […]
The Art of the Steal: Joyous, Clever, and Fun
July 11, 2014
By Noah Charney. The first compliment I will pay to the new art heist movie, The Art of the Steal (2013), written and directed by Jonathan Sobol, is that it did not annoy me. That may sound like damning with faint praise, but I’ve got a good deal more praise […]
Cutting Room Cleanup: Junger’s Korengal
July 10, 2014
By Paul Risker. The war on terror has received ample coverage on news and media outlets. But in an age when we are questioning or are being encouraged to question our sources of information, we are still forced to tolerate a certain vantage point from which to view world events. Four […]
Sorcerer (1977)
July 9, 2014
By William Repass. “You think they pay you to drive? They pay you to be terrified. That’s your division of labor.” –The Wages of Fear (1953) Let’s not overlook the attendant division, that of leisure. Supposing, for example, you’d rather pay to be terrified. In that case look no further than […]
Finding Fault with The Fault In Our Stars
July 7, 2014
By Jacob Mertens. A month or so back, Slate posted an article in anticipation of Josh Boone’s film The Fault In Our Stars¹—based on John Green’s popular Young Adult book by the same name—in which author Ruth Graham used the timeliness of this release to shame adults about reading YA […]
Life As He Saw It
July 4, 2014
By Paul Risker. There is the frequently re-iterated question of what is the value of a life. The cinematic equivalent is the time given to telling a person’s life story. When you consider the time one expends personally and professionally, and in the case of former Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger […]
Seeing Your Doppelganger Can Only Spell Trouble: Enemy (2013)
July 3, 2014
By Janine Gericke. Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy opens with a quote from José Saramago’s novel The Double, which Enemy is loosely based on, “Chaos is order yet undeciphered.” Well, that peaked my interest. College history professor, Adam Bell (Jake Gyllenhaal), leads a normal, yet fairly mundane, life. He spends his days […]
The Good Neighbour (2013)
July 1, 2014
By Sam Littman. Not one element of Astrid Schau-Larsen’s documentary The Good Neighbour is superfluous. For this and many tangential reasons alone it is appreciable; the 58-minute investigative effort principally concerned with relaying information and opinions as concisely as possible is satisfied with its borderline feature-length running time, sustains an acute focus […]
Cinema that Goes to Eleven: Mike “McBeardo” McPadden’s Heavy Metal Movies (2014)
June 27, 2014
A Book Review by Brandon Konecny. Let all metalheads throw up their devilhorns in celebration—Mike “McBeardo” McPadden’s blood-soaked, guitar-churning anthology Heavy Metal Movies: Guitar Barbarians, Mutant Bimbos, & Cult Zombies Amok in the 666 Most Ear- and Eye-Ripping Big-Scream Films Ever! is finally here, arriving from the hellish depths of […]