Review

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Oculus is a rather pretentious title for a rather straightforward movie, but despite the assembly line nature of its’ construction, the film still has something going for it. At first it’s hard to say precisely what the film has to offer, because on the surface it […]

By Jacob Mertens. The Raid 2 opens with a wide shot of a man kneeling beside a freshly dug grave. Facing his inevitable death, the film captures him as a small creature unable to influence the pendulum swing of fate. When the camera moves in, viewers see that this poor […]

By Daniel Lindvall. “Do you know why I eat only roots? Because roots are important,” explains a 104-year-old nun to the greying author and playboy Jep Gambardella, main character of Paolo Sorrentino’s recent Oscar winner, The Great Beauty. Forty years ago Gambardella wrote the roman à clef of his generation. […]

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. I’m teaching a class right now in comic book movies, partly to trace the history of the genre from the 1940s on – when they began as Saturday morning serials – and partly to discover, if I could, why these films have moved to the mainstream […]

By Matthew Sorrento. To regard the “First Murder” of the Judeo-Christian tradition as a parable on fratricide is to miss the greater point. The brother turning on his own does channel an uncanny dread, and yet the tale comments on the universality of the crime: how any murder is like […]

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Many years ago, in 1969, when I was working as a writer for Life magazine under editor Thomas Thompson, one of the highlights of my working week came on Monday, when the screening schedule of newly released films would be distributed throughout the office, and we’d […]

By Daniel Lindvall. François Truffaut’s classic first film, The 400 Blows, ends on a beach. Antoine Doinel (played by Jean-Pierre Léaud, who must have been about 14 when the film was shot) has just run away from a borstal in the middle of a game of football. The film leaves […]

By Jacob Mertens.  To call Joe anything but a return to form for director David Gordon Green would be a disservice. And that has nothing to do with how terrible his recent spate of films have been, save for the uneven but affecting Prince Avalanche (2013). Instead, it has to […]

A Book Review by Brandon Konecny. In the introduction of his Post New Wave Cinema in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, published in 1989, Daniel J. Goulding writes, “Among the internationally significant national cinemas of Central and Eastern Europe, only Romania has shown little sign of renewal…At the time […]

  By Jacob Mertens. A man and a woman lie naked on a bed of black satin, their pale skin holding the frame like a match struck in a dark room. Eyes closed, bodies delicately entwined, the two form an unconscious union. They hold close to each other and sleep […]