By Jonathan Monovich. Burns intends on making the Millers artists and is keen to understand that partnerships, like artists, do not always have the spark.” Writer/Director/Actor Edward Burns has long strived to live by Robert Bresson’s words “make visible what, without you, might perhaps never be seen.”1 His first film, […]
Blurred Boundaries, Inside and Outside of Marriage: Alan Zhang on This Woman
By Yun-hua Chen. During the pandemic, Li Haihai and I discovered a shared fascination with portraying a female figure navigating life inside and outside of marriage.” Beibei—a daughter, a wife, a mother—finds herself at a crossroads when she loses her steady job and faces the uncertainties of the pandemic. In […]
Sweet Dreams: Irony, Power Dynamics, and Dance in Kinds of Kindness
By M. Sellers Johnson. Through acute genre-defying sensibilities of black comedy, arbitrary of conduct, supernatural inflections, and elusive drama, the multi-narrative Kind of Kindness presents messy, yet biting tales of humanity beset by submission, conspiracy, and cults of persuasion.” Kinds of Kindness (2024) is a vigorous power play of peculiar […]
Unstoppable: Wrestling and the Plasmatic
By Justin Muchnick. No amount of movie magic, it seems, can fully replace Robles’ own unparalleled plasmaticness. I only wish Sergei Eisenstein could have seen this film, too….” The Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein, pioneer of film theory and lover of Disney cartoons, coined the term plasmatic to describe the ecstatic […]
Architects of Their Own Stories – The Cinema Coven: Witches, Witchcraft and Women’s Filmmaking
A Book Review by Dávid Szőke. Alexandra Heller-Nicholas reveals the potential of contemporary filmmaking to challenge conventional cultural narratives about the witch, offering these figures greater space where they are no longer just passive objects of our anxieties but architects of their own stories.” The figure of the witch as […]
Two Early Genre Gems: The Bat (1926) and The Canary Murder Case (1929)
By Thomas Gladysz. Released by Undercrank Productions, The Bat stands as a high point in the ‘old dark house’ genre / sub-genre.” In the first decades of the 20th century, film was finding its way. Then, the various genres were being defined — and redefined, with the release of just […]
Joker Folie á Deux and the Shared Madness of Modern Film Critics
By Gary D. Rhodes. It is so very easy to hobgoblinize a film, even if one needs a thesaurus to ferret out an abundance of negative adjectives. And yet, I am struck by the sheer number of blatant errors and falsehoods about FáD that mainstream critics have relied upon.” Todd […]
Redefining Modernist Acting and Feminist Resistance: Isabelle Huppert, Modernist Performance
A Book Review by Jenny Paola Ortega Castillo. Author Florence Jacobowitz argues that Huppert’s artistic career represents a form of cultural resistance, using her art to challenge social norms and redefine what it means to be an actress in contemporary modernist cinema.” Isabelle Huppert, Modernist Performance by Florence Jacobowitz (Wayne […]
The Unmanageable Maid
By Robert K. Lightning. Whether through indifference, innuendo, or caustic commentary, she makes her opinions apparent to her employers and, essentially, subverts any pretense of absolute authority over her. She is effectively unmanageable.” In honor of the fiftieth anniversary of its publication in 1973, I recently pulled Donald Bogle’s Toms, […]
On the Brink of Obliteration: Black Dog (Gou Zhen, 2024)
By Yun-hua Chen. A portrait of a town on the brink of obliteration and a meditation on lives rendered powerless by political and socioeconomic currents….” A man and a dog in a small northwestern town in China’s Gobi Desert—this premise might sound like a minimalist bore, but not when the […]