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 […]
The Cacophony of History: Cinéma Militant by Paul Douglas Grant
January 30, 2017
A Book Review by John Duncan Talbird. Paul Douglas Grant’s new book Cinéma Militant: Political Filmmaking & May 1968 (Wallflower Press, 2016) is a history of leftist French film – mostly Marxist-Leninist or Maoist – arising out of the student-worker protests of May ’68 and stretching to the late seventies when […]
Hello, Daleks – Good to Have You Back: Dr. Who The Power of the Daleks Animated Restoration on DVD
By Tony Williams. 50 years ago I watched the one and only BBC TV transmission of The Power of the Daleks (November to December, 1966) one of the now missing serials of the early Dr. Who series (premiering in 1963). The opening episode introduced Patrick Troughton (1920-1987) as the replacement for […]
The New Southern Gothic: Loving, Jeff Nichols, and the Southern Artist in the 21st Century
By Will Tomford. As I watched Loving come to an end, I thought to myself, please don’t have an epilogue text. An artistic director like Jeff Nichols wouldn’t need to end a film with anyting but an ambiguous shot. But to my dissapointment, there it was: the what-happened-next. Maybe this […]
DVD as Reference Library: His Girl Friday on Criterion
By Tony Williams. Since companies have decided to issue features accompanying DVD reissues of films available on VHS and Laserdisc in the past, the value of these additions vary with each product. For some distributors, they are extras of little value except to add padding to sell product that many […]
Cat People: Horror, Necessity, and Creative Collaboration
January 13, 2017
By Jeremy Carr. Who gets the credit for Cat People (1942)? Is it first-time producer Val Lewton, who though generally overlooked in his day has since received considerable reappraisal for his innovative, low-budget ingenuity? Or is it director Jacques Tourneur, the French emigre who would bring a shadowy visual flair […]
It’s Complicated: Joss Whedon and Race by Mary Ellen Iatropoulos and Lowery A. Woodall III
January 11, 2017
A Book Review by Jessica Baxter. Let’s face it. White liberals are having a “woke” moment that is shamefully long overdue. Growing up in the 1980s and early 90s as a white middle class kid from a moderately open-minded family (albeit residing in the conservative American south east), I was […]
Equality with a Discursive, Televisual Face: TV Socialism by Aniko Imre
A Book Review by Tony Williams. In Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955) the enigmatic voice of Dr. Soberin delivers one of his voice-of-God traditional thespian pronouncements over the prone, semi-crucified body of savior/destroyer Mike Hammer, whose actor (Ralph Meeker) belongs to a very different performance acting style. “How civilized […]