Review

A book review by Liza Palmer. In 2004, I had the pleasure of reviewing the first edition of Tony Lee Moral’s Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie for Scope. When I was approached to review the revised edition, I did not hesitate, recalling the first version to be a strong, […]

By Cleaver Patterson. A book like J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit was always going to be too big in size and scope to be contained, should it ever be made, by just one film. Whether this justifies stretching it over three, as New Zealand director Peter Jackson has done, […]

By Robert Kenneth Dator. Every single bit of visual stimulus that comes to the human brain via the visual cortex must be interpreted, learned, and filed away for future reference. This morgue of literally countless images—and more important, bits of images—from every conceivable axial point of reference serves as a […]

A Book Review by Jack Curtis Dubowsky. Henry Mancini—the iconic composer of ‘Moon River,’ ‘Peter Gunn,’ ‘Baby Elephant Walk,’ ‘The Pink Panther,’ over 100 feature films, and winner of twenty Grammys and four academy awards—leaves a problematic musical legacy. As John Caps, author of this new book, puts it, “His […]

By Adam O’Brien. Like Roberto Rossellini, Ernst Lubitsch is a filmmaker whose greatness is both clear and very difficult to articulate. Penetrating and illuminating writing on his work (like that on Rossellini’s) is something of a rarity, and the availability of his films on DVD has been somewhat patchy. But […]

A Book Review by Brandon Konecny.  The increasing visibility of Eastern European films—those of the Romanian New Wave, especially—in the United States has brought with it a corresponding rise in volumes published on the subject, including, most notably, East European Cinemas (2005), The BFI Companion to Eastern European and Russian Cinema […]

By Matthew Sorrento. Prominent for years on American television, John Frankenheimer’s Seconds had disappeared by the advent of DVD and remained unavailable until the recent Criterion release. With a generation unfamiliar with any official print, the film was gone – like its central character’s appearance by the end of the first act. […]

By Jacob Mertens.  In film, there is often a feeling of moral certainty. A protagonist has a line drawn for him by cultural expectations and he knows not to cross it, lest he find himself the villain of his own story. However, if any genre has been poised over the […]

By Mark James.  Call it Le Cruising. French filmmaker Alain Guiraudie stages a stripped-down rendition of William Friedkin’s 1980 gay serial killer thriller, set by a lake in the French mountains. Awarded a directing prize at this year’s Cannes, Stranger by the Lake handles its subject much more ably than […]

By Oana Chivoiu.  Pedro Costa’s landmark is an aesthetic of austerity that resonates with the thematic content in his features dealing with poverty, slum life, and radical limitations. Colossal Youth is a film about loss, a theme that structures the disjointed narrative fluency of the film and anchors its visual […]