Review

By Jake Rutkowski. It’s hard to view the discourse around baseball’s most recent and protracted steroid use scandal as anything other than a proxy culture war, an outlet for the basest pearl-clutching and ideological chest-pounding. The pieces are all there: an institution steeped in perpetual nostalgia, aided by a media […]

A Book Review by Mads Larsen. The timing could hardly be better. Every month seems to throw more gasoline onto the political fire that this edited volume hopes to be a part of. But while editors Christina Gerhardt and Sara Saljoughi have written an introduction with ambitions that – if […]

By Jeremy Carr. There is so much potential tragedy in the first twenty minutes of Diane that the film appears instantly in danger of over-stressing the point of its dramatic tension. This subdued, 2018 release, the debut narrative feature from Kent Jones – director of the documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut (2015), director of the […]

By Yun-hua Chen. Jia Zhangke’s latest, Ash is the Purest White, three years after his previous film Mountains May Depart (2015) which ambitiously spans from 1999 till futuristic 2025 and journeys from Fengyang in Shanxi Province to Perth in Australia, continues with his incessant probing of how China changes but […]

A Book Review by John Fawell. I’ve always been somewhat surprised by the amount of critical attention paid to Charlie Chaplin’s sound films, considering they represent, for the most part, his comedic talents in decline and his frustrated efforts to contend with a medium essentially hostile to his genius for […]

By Elias Savada. Larry Fessenden has plenty of fans. A versatile producer, director, writer, editor, cinematographer, and actor in dozens of low-budget flicks, he’s left his mark for more than two decades on the horror genre. Since he’s heavily influenced by the classic Universal monsters, it is not surprising that his […]

By Rod Lott. Death aside, it’s a good time to be José Ramón Larraz. The Spanish director finally gets his due, a quarter-century after Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs made the case for it in their seminal book, Immoral Tales: European Sex and Horror Movies, 1956-1984. The seeds they planted […]

  By Christopher Sharrett. Among the few films that impressed me last season was Paul Dano’s first film as director, Wildlife, based on a book (which I have not read) by Richard Ford. The film received some applause when it opened, then vanished, to be covered over by the rubbish […]

By Michael Sandlin. Icelandic director Benedikt Erlingsson, in his sophomore directorial effort Woman at War, imagines the chaos that ensues when a middle-aged spinster’s frustrated motherly instincts compete with her radical eco-political commitment to defeat her country’s pollution-friendly patriarchy. Much like Erlingsson’s bizarre equinophilic tale Of Horses and Men (2014), Woman […]