By Jeremy Carr. When he wasn’t genre hopping from Film Noir to Westerns to epic spectacles and war films, the perpetually underrated Anthony Mann was mixing conventions and mingling styles amongst more indefinable works. These were films like Reign of Terror (1949), The Tall Target (1951), Serenade (1956), and, perhaps […]
Gravity (2013)
February 25, 2014
By Jacob Mertens. Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) drifts in zero gravity, curled into a fetal pose with eyes closed, as if the decompression chamber was a womb. She has withstood an onslaught of space debris that wiped out her fellow astronauts and as she hovers above the ground, sunlight […]
Les Cousins (1959)
February 21, 2014
By Christopher Neilan. In 1958, twenty-seven year old cahiers du cinema critic Claude Chabrol spent his wife’s inheritance money shooting his debut feature Le beau Serge, a Hitchcock influenced morality piece starring Gérard Blain and Jean-Claude Brialy. The film, which earned the best director prize from the Locarno film festival, […]
Autumn Sonata (1978)
February 15, 2014
By Jeremy Carr. “A mother and a daughter. What a terrible combination of feelings and confusion and destruction.” So says Eva (Liv Ullmann) toward the end of Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata (1978). More than any other line of dialogue, in what is a remarkably written film, this gets to the […]
Shackled (Belenggu): A Well-Mounted Disappointment
February 11, 2014
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. I wish I could say kinder things about this film, especially since it’s clear that this was a labor of love on the part of its director, Upi Avianto, an Indonesian genre filmmaker with numerous other films to her credit, such as Looking For Love in […]
The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
February 7, 2014
By William Repass. Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street begins with a simple equation: money is a drug. “Enough of this shit will make you invincible,” enthuses Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), as he leans in to snort a line of coke in extreme close-up, “you’ll be able to conquer the […]
Hollywood Exiles in Europe
February 3, 2014
A Book Review by Wheeler Winston Dixon. Let’s just start by saying that this is an excellent book. I get stacks of new titles every day from publishers, and it takes a lot for a book to really jump out of the pile and interest me, particularly on a topic […]
American Hustle (2013)
January 31, 2014
By Jacob Mertens. David O. Russell’s American Hustle begins with a title card stating “Some of this actually happened,” and for once a Hollywood film makes an honest claim to real events. Upon closer examination though, Russell had little choice but to say so. His film features well-developed characters, but […]
The Cinematic Palette from Feudal Japan – Gate of Hell
January 28, 2014
By Giuseppe Sedia. Beyond any artistic value or aesthetic significance, the critical response to Gate of Hell (1953) provides a rare glimpse into the evolution of cinematic taste in the Fifties. According to Jean Cocteau, who served as jury president at the 1954 Cannes Film Festival, Kinugasa’s visually flamboyant jidai-geki displayed […]
The Conformists: Creativity and Decadence in the Bulgarian Cinema 1945-89 (2011)
January 21, 2014
A Book Review by Brandon Konecny. A full historical account of Bulgaria’s cinema under Communism—given the topic’s obscurity and the lack of translated resources in the West, such a venture seems to smack of futility. To even have hopes of pulling off a project of this sort, one would have […]