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 […]
Celebrating a Life Well Spent: Itzhak
April 25, 2018
By Elias Savada. It’s fitting that this refreshing documentary starts out with the world renowned violinist Itzhak Perlman performing a rousing rendition of The Star Spangled Banner at Citi Field in Queens, New York. He may have been born in Tel Aviv 70-plus years ago, but he’s a die-hard Mets fan […]
Where is Kyra?: Women in Transition
By Christopher Sharrett. I have no reservations about using a central, foundational handbook serving women as the subtitle to this piece (in part because my wife was co-author of the original edition), since the topic of Charles Dosunmu’s excellent film is women made peripheral and in transit in the current […]
The Endless: Who’s Crazy Now?
April 21, 2018
By Elias Savada. I’ve been a fan of horror maestros Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead ever since catching their 2012 feature debut Resolution at that year’s SpookyFest in Washington DC. Last year that festival (following the lead of the Tribeca Film Festival, where the filmmakers are deservedly well appreciated) also sported […]
A Genre Reclaimed: Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge
April 18, 2018
By Alex Brannan. There is a critical stigma to the small subset of films that comprise the rape-revenge genre – or, at the very least, a healthy hesitation. In 1980, Roger Ebert famously took down Meir Zarchi’s I Spit on Your Grave, calling it “a vile bag of garbage … without […]
An Archive of Indoctrination: Hitler’s Hollywood
April 16, 2018
By Jeremy Carr. Even if there wasn’t a compelling, underlying thesis to Hitler’s Hollywood: German Cinema in the Age of Propaganda: 1933–1945, this 2017 film by Rüdiger Suchsland would still be a valuable, fascinating record. For the sheer breadth of assembled material, an overwhelming array of Third Reich-era film clips from […]