Review

By Brandon Konecny. The adaptation of a novel to film is a difficult undertaking. Our judgment of a novel’s cinematic counterpart is, as Robert Stam perceptively points out, profoundly moralistic: we use such words as “infidelity” and “betrayal” to communicate our discontent with a filmic rendering of a text, each […]

By Steven Harrison Gibbs. I should begin by stating that I do not regularly indulge in assessing the average narrative film with politics near the forefront of my mind. When it comes to film criticism, I prefer to place emphasis on other aspects that, at least for me, play a […]

By Jacob Mertens.  A couple years ago, I traveled to England for an internship and decided that so long as I was on that side of the ocean, I would go ahead and see Malta, Italy, and France as well. I remember stepping off the train into Rome and stumbling […]

By Cleaver Patterson. Films that sell themselves as horror movies generally fall into one of two camps. They either go for all-out viscerals, leaving little to the viewer’s imagination as they try to outdo what has gone before with evermore graphic and gory visuals, or they rely on subtlety and […]

A book review by Wheeler Winston Dixon. This slight but explosive volume, published in an English translation by Verso in 2012, has been kicking around on my work desk for about a year. I wrote a rather negative review of it for Choice, the library journal, and while I don’t […]

By Hector Arkomanis.  The main story–the construction of the railway–is fairly well known by now, but that only makes Ford’s poetry even more noticeable here: the human figure set against sublime landscapes[1]; documentary-like scenes of men laying tracks on the fields and of buffalo cattle being lead across the plane […]

By Luke Aspell.  Taken as lost, City Girl dramatizes its own predicament in reverse. Our Daily Bread, the story of wheat from which this 1930 Fox release was re-cut, would have hymned the cyclical sense of Tustine’s (David Torrence) life of toil. In the light of that perspective, it is […]

By Matthew Sorrento. You’d think that Woody Allen would have exorcized it already, after all the complicated romances he’s filmed, of equal parts truth and bitterness. After moving from his early works of farce and confirming his range with tragic romantic comedies in the late 1970s, he let flow a […]

By Matthew Sorrento. The early American studios acquired literary properties for prestige productions, regardless of what genre grew as a result. The style of classical horror, which emerged in the early 1930s at Universal Studios, appeared largely by accident. By adapting Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the studio […]

By Cleaver Patterson. ‘Masterpiece’ is a word used all to freely in the world of cinema, frequently to describe films which are less than deserving of such praise. So, when one emerges that truly warrants this epithet, like Brian De Palma’s erotic crime classic Dressed to Kill, the power of […]