Straight Shooting By Tony Williams. These two magnificent Blu-ray restorations reproduce the way the films were originally seen and also contain audio-commentaries and video essays by two pioneering Ford scholars: Joseph McBride and Tag Gallagher.” Following on the trail pioneered by the 2016 re-release of John Ford’s Three Bad Men […]
Trouble in the DC Universe (the City and the Comics): Wonder Woman 1984
By Elias Savada. Like so many presents found under the tree this Christmas Day, there might be a lot of folks asking for a refund after viewing this sad excuse for a sequel. It’s a wonder that Warner Bros. has let its prized new female-empowerment franchise slide off the rails […]
A Smash in the Face: Greenland
Another Clarke (the Comet) arrives for the Christmas movie season. By Elias Savada. Greenland, the latest comet disaster flick to smash into our planet, will be one easily forgotten. Comets and meteors and asteroids, oh my! These bits of interstellar debris have been attacking our audio-visual senses for ages, fictionally […]
That’s Why I Don’t Own the World: Hollywood’s Hard Luck Ladies
Rita Johnson (with Ray Milland) in The Big Clock (John Farrow, 1948) A Book Review by Zoe Kurland. With meticulous details gathered from an impressive variety of sources, Hollywood’s Hard Luck Ladies implies that, regardless of luck, Hollywood was (and is) quite unkind to women, especially those who attempt to […]
Stay for a While: Patrick Picard’s The Bloodhound
By Thomas Puhr. A bold work, one which – though scattershot – still ranks among 2020’s superior genre releases.” A hooded figure emerges from a lake. Without making a sound, it crawls over the rocky shore, through the doorway of a sleek house, and into a closet, where it will […]
Inspiring the Unsung Collaborators: The Art of Film Projection
A Book Review by Ted Knighton. The profession has become endangered or has been deskilled into non-existence, which is why this beginners manual is so overdue.” –from the foreword by Tacita Dean and Christopher Nolan In 2000, I was invited to show my short, 16mm film Six Insects at a […]
Too Long in the Saddle: Paul Greengrass and News of the World
By Elias Savada. News of the World ambles from scene to scene with an occasional spectacular landscape….Tom Hanks, front and center again, isn’t enough to carry the film.” It’s hard to believe that over the course of his well-worn career that Tom Hanks has never been in a western (although he […]
Shanley, Act Three, Fade-Out: Wild Mountain Thyme
By Gary M. Kramer. Wild Mountain Thyme does provide some simple pleasures but suggests that Shanley is a far better writer than director.” John Patrick Shanley is well known as the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Moonstruck, and better known as the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Doubt, for which he also won […]
Justice for Alternative Identities: Queer Japan
By Matthew Fullerton. A welcomed addition to a wonderful run, in recent years, of international documentaries highlighting the experiences, struggles, and successes of LGBTQ people in countries not normally associated with sensitivity toward LGBTQ activism.” Queer Japan, from Canadian filmmaker Graham Kolbeins and Altered Innocence, an American distributor of artistic […]
A Long Trail to Continue: Women in the Western
Unforgiven (John Huston, 1960) A Book Review by Tanja Bresan. These extensive and reference-filled essays prove [that] the role of women in the Western was often as an additional accessory, dubious and regularly mistreated, but never not important or secondary.” Director Anthony Mann famously said, “without a woman the Western […]