By Elias Savada. So, as numerous superhero universes collide in worldwide multiplexes, you might wonder if there is an escalating case of mega-budget overload on the horizon. 20th Century-Fox’s Deadpool 2 arrives three weeks after Disney’s oversized Avengers: Infinity Wars shredded box office records in advance of this weekend’s match-up, which […]
Comic Discoveries – The Marcel Perez Collection: Vol. 2
May 15, 2018
By Jeremy Carr. Marcel Perez certainly isn’t the most renowned name in silent screen comedy. He’s likely not even among its top ten most recognizable figures. But that didn’t stop composer and DVD producer/distributor Ben Model, along with a legion of 153 Kickstarter supporters, from pushing forward a volume of […]
Times Remembered – Junior Bonner: The Making of a Classic with Steve McQueen and Sam Peckinpah in the Summer of 1971 by Jeb Rosebrook with Stuart Rosebrook
A Book Review by Tony Williams. It is frequently true that publishers like Bear Manor Media not only offer the possibility of valuable access to books that are rarely considered by corporate concerns, whether inside or outside academia, but give any reviewer both light relief and pleasure from the heavyweight […]
Beautiful Hopelessness: Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here
By Thomas Puhr. On paper, Lynne Ramsay’s breathtaking You Were Never Really Here (2017) sounds like one of Luc Besson’s off-the-cuff side projects, ala Taken (2008) or Colombiana (2011). After a mysterious war veteran, Joe (Joaquin Phoenix, who is only getting better with age), rescues a senator’s abducted daughter from […]
An Insufficient Measure of Novelty: Jim Loach’s Measure of a Man (2018)
May 12, 2018
By Brandon Konecny. There’s a scene in Measure of a Man where Bobby (Blake Cooper) bickers with his sister Michelle (Liana Liberato) after she knocked the scoop off his chocolate-dipped ice cream cone. A shirtless Pete Marino (Luke Benward) interrupts their squabbling and introduces himself to Michelle. This leads to a […]
Market Values – Screening Stephen King: Adaptation and the Horror Genre in Film and Television by Simon Brown
The Shining (1980) A Book Review by Tony Williams. During my final year in what was soon becoming Thatcher’s “green and septic isle” even before Blair and Tessie, I read quite a number of early Stephen King novels such as Carrie (1974), Salem’s Lot (1975), The Shining (1977), Cujo (1981), The Dead […]
A Modern Classic Revised: The French Cinema Book, 2nd Edition, Edited by Michael Temple and Michael Witt
May 1, 2018
A Book Review by Margaret C. Flinn. In 2004, Michael Temple and Michael Witt published the first edition of The French Cinema Book (Palgrave/BFI, 2018) – an extremely welcome volume that succeeded in forcefully reframing the project of introducing the history of French cinema in a single volume. Now, 14 years later, Temple […]
Becoming Cary Grant: The Awful Truth from Criterion
By Tony Williams. It appears very unusual to think that the debonair star we tend to think of as an actual person was an invention, someone whom the actor himself would have liked to be in real life. Though seeing some of his films theatrically on first release such as […]
Ghost Stories: Earnest and Campy
By Alex Brannan. To break it down into the simplest of taxonomies, there are two types of horror anthology film: those which present discrete short films preoccupied around a central theme, and those which situate their shorts within a frame narrative. Both types have had a long cinematic history – […]
A Televisual Tale of Three Cities – Television Cities: Paris, London, Baltimore by Charlotte Brunsdon
A Book Review by Tony Williams. This concisely written and informative monograph represents a critical examination of the role cityscapes play within certain televised fictional representations. While many books exist on the city landscape, the marginalization of television as a valid discursive territory in its own right has led to […]