By Elias Savada. With an omp pa pa, everybody sing! “Music Makes the Wheels Go Round, the Wheels Go Round, the Wheels Go Round!” And when you’re finished, check out the adrenaline-boosted start-to-finish-line playlist and the fast-paced action in Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver. With an intensely supercharged soundtrack driving the frantic […]
Mutating War Traumas: Monsters in the Machine by Steffen Hantke
A Book Review by Christopher Weedman. Steffen Hantke’s welcome new book Monsters in the Machine: Science Fiction Film and the Militarization of America after World War II (University Press of Mississippi, 2016) is an articulate and well-researched socio-political examination of the cycle of science fiction films that arose to popularity […]
Ivor and Hitch: the Criterion 2017 DVD Versions of The Lodger and Downhill
By Tony Williams. Although currently promoted mainly as a restoration of The Lodger (1927), a film that its director regarded as his first real film, this two-disc DVD also includes the frequently unseen Downhill, also starring Ivor Novello (1893-1951), a major matinee idol in his time well known as a musical […]
Power Off: Kill Switch
June 28, 2017
By Elias Savada. There’s a lot of technical wizardry afoot in Dutch filmmaker Tim Smit’s feature directorial debut Kill Switch, an indie sci fi race-to-save-the-planet flick set in the depressing, dystopian future of March 24, 2043. Yeah, been there, done that. E.T. phoned home a long time ago in a much […]
Taking Stock – The Second Edition of the Criterion Collection’s Straw Dogs
By Tony Williams. In 2003 Criterion issued a two-disk DVD version of Sam Peckinpah’s controversial Straw Dogs (1971) when the issue of the director’s supposed virulent misogyny and sexism still raised critical debate and strong emotions. Fourteen years later a second edition has now appeared with most of the same […]
Eternal Fugitives: Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night from Criterion
By Tony Williams. Again Criterion have provided us with a welcome reissue of a classic film noir now in a new 2k digital restoration with valuable feature material including the 2007 audio commentary by “Czar of Noir” Eddie Muller and Farley Granger, now sadly no longer with us. (Though available on […]
Cinematic Archeology and the Portrayal of a “Wonder Woman”: Letters from Baghdad
By Martin Kudláč. In the 1996 film The English Patient directed by Anthony Minghella is a scene with British soldiers examining a map. “But can we get through those mountains?” to which another replies “The Bell maps show a way” followed by “Let´s hope he was right.” This reference has […]
An Appreciation of Call Me By Your Name
June 21, 2017
By Zhuo-Ning Su. Films are lives imagined, projected, simulated. When the play-pretend is effective and the make-believe works, we can hope to lose ourselves in a staged reality that convincingly reflects our own. Every once in a long while, however, a movie would come along that, for reasons often too […]
Documenting Post-Millennial Teens: All This Panic
By Kate Hearst. With an artful lens, All This Panic captures the awkward and fleeting stage of teenagers on the cusp of young adulthood. Over the course of three years, Brooklyn-based wife and husband art photographers, Jenny Gage and Tom Betterton, follow seven high school girls who attend the La […]
You Can’t Keep Quiet Anymore: Atomic Homefront
June 18, 2017
By Elias Savada. If you’re not screaming mad by the end of Atomic Homefront, you obviously believe the system works. As a study in government failure and corporate greed, this HBO-supported documentary from director Rebecca Cammisa shows that your trust is grievously and tragically misplaced if you expect the Environmental Protection […]