By Christopher Sharrett. I was curious about Jordan Peele’s film Get Out. I heard rumors that it was a riposte to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), that bizarre mistake by the good-hearted Stanley Kramer, where a young white woman (Katharine Houghton) takes her black fiancé (Sidney Poitier) home to […]
Just Do It!: Get Out
February 24, 2017
By Elias Savada. You don’t need to be creative when making a low budget horror film. They can suck, yet are usually profitable with just a video-on-demand deal. Getting an on-the-cheap scary picture to register positively in the public’s mind is another story. I definitely get the feeling that Blumhouse, the […]
A Big Crumble: The Great Wall
By Elias Savada. So, let’s get to the big question you’re asking your mirror. Is Matt Damon’s new fantasy action movie the greatest wall of them all? Well, for big screen entertainment, including those of you who like this sort of FX-driven, over-stylized, popcorn munching diversion, The Great Wall is […]
Condition: Cloudy – A Patch of Fog
February 15, 2017
By Elias Savada. Irish director Michael Lennox has been to the Oscars – for his 2014 film Boogaloo and Graham, a heartwarming comedy short. It lost, but at least people (well, Academy voters) saw it. Now, Lennox has gone over to the dark side with his feature debut, A Patch of […]
The Passion of James Baldwin: I Am Not Your Negro
February 13, 2017
By John Duncan Talbird. On the police brutality episode of ABC’s sitcom Black-ish, the teenaged son, Junior (Marcus Scribner), reads out loud from Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me (2015). His father, Dre (Anthony Anderson), derisively responds, “Malcolm X said the same thing fifty years ago.” Dre’s father (Laurence Fishburne) […]
Family and Transition: This is Everything – Gigi Gorgeous
By Kate Hearst. Over the course of forty-plus years, Barbara Kopple has made her documentaries with one focus: to be truthful to the voices of her subjects, whether they are coal miners or country singers. In her new film, This is Everything: Gigi Gorgeous, Kopple crafts a heart-gripping narrative capturing the […]
The Heart of Fuller’s Marauders: Film is Like a Battleground – Samuel Fuller’s War Movies by Marsha Gordon
February 7, 2017
A Book Review by Tony Williams. During his lifetime, Samuel Fuller was fortunate enough to receive acclaim from monographs and articles dedicated to his films as well as continue working for as long as possible in film, unlike Buster Keaton and Douglas Sirk. Regardless of championship by Cahiers du Cinema, the […]
A Conquering Female Spirit in The Brand New Testament
February 6, 2017
By Kate Hearst. First screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2015, and recently released in the United States, Belgian director Jaco Van Dormael’s surrealistic fantasy, The Brand New Testament, chronicles a familial struggle between a mean-spirited patriarchal God (Benoît Poelvoorde) and his feisty ten-year old-daughter Ea (Pili Groyne) with humanity […]
Out of the Past: Jack Garfein’s Something Wild on Criterion
By Tony Williams. Something Wild (1961) has nothing to do with the similarly titled well-known 1986 Jonathan Demme film. In fact before the list of Criterion new releases arrived, I frankly confess that I had never even heard of it. How can anyone now claim to have an encyclopedia knowledge […]
Lars-Martin Sorenson’s Censorship of Japanese Films during the U.S. Occupation of Japan: The Cases of Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa
A Book Review by Matthew Fullerton. Lars-Martin Sorenson is probably best known to cinephiles for his interview on censorship during the American occupation of Japan, which accompanies Criterion’s 2007 release of Drunken Angel (1948). At the time, he had just completed his PhD, and Censorship of Japanese Films during the […]