By Elias Savada. Bruce Willis still tracks 243 on the IMDB.com STARmeter scale (I’m at 1,325,678). All kind of entertainment folk are part of the ratings, and Willis has been moving downward lately after decades in the top 100. His gradual tumble down the rankings rabbit hole began with the […]
Diversity and Unity – Global Cinematic Cities: New Landscapes of Film and Media, Edited by Johan Andersson and Lawrence Webb
A Book Review by Margaret C. Flinn. Johan Andersson and Lawrence Webb’s Global Cinema Cities (Columbia UP, 2016) poses as its task to explore “the evolving, mutually constitutive relations between moving image media and the global city, [but to do] so at a time when profound questions are being asked about […]
Out of the Dark(room) and Into the Light – The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography
July 19, 2017
By Elias Savada. There is an elegant, simple beauty in documentarian Errol Morris’s affectionate portrait of his friend, soft-spoken, 80-year-old Elsa Dorfman, in his new film. In a career that spanned the majority of her adult life, Dorfman has found the fun in photography, and it’s probably best to spell it […]
Facts are Not Stupid Things: Lessons from The Reagan Show
By Heather Hendershot. One week after Donald Trump’s inauguration, Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here reached the #9 position in book sales on Amazon. Brave New World held the #15 slot. Sales also spiked for Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. At the same time, according to Penguin USA, sales of 1984 increased by […]
Eleven Heroines Does a Feminist Film Make: Reading Srijit Mukherjee’s Rajkahini
By Devapriva Sanyal and Melissa Webb. Srijit Mukherji’s Rajkahini (2015) is the Bengali version of 2017’s much feted Begum Jaan, the film which served as the director’s first foray into Bollywood. The film is centred on India’s Partition and is uniquely seen through the eyes of women: a group of prostitutes in […]
A Most Assured First Feature: One Penny
July 15, 2017
By Elias Savada. Part I: The Buildup So, how many teenagers have you met who say they want to make movies when they grow up? Fame and fortune is just around the corner, right? Well, I’ve seen too many homegrown filmmaker dreams turn into muddled nightmares on the road to stardom, […]
Maurice Revisited: A Timely Return to Theaters
July 14, 2017
By Anthony Uzarowski. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the decriminalisation of homosexual acts in the UK. There could be no better time to revisit one of the country’s greatest cinematic gay love stories, filmed thirty years ago, and now returning to the screens in all its digitally restored glory. Based […]
A Feisty Wizard of Cinema: Mickey Rooney, a Show Business Life by James A. MacEachern
A Book Review by Louis J. Wasser. If the glimpses we catch on screen of an actor’s body of work ultimately amount to autobiography, the late Mickey Rooney (1920-2014) told us his life story through a distinguished, albeit frequently checkered, career in film and entertainment. In his recent biography, Mickey […]
Visions of Invasion: An Interview with Mathieu Ratthe on The Gracefield Incident
July 13, 2017
By Jeremy Carr. Before ever beginning his debut feature film, director Mathieu Ratthe had proven himself adept at two critical techniques. First is a keen ability to manipulate and employ the most effective strategies of the horror genre (proper scares, an unsettling atmosphere, startling twists). Second is to do so with […]
Call for Submissions: The Trail of the Zodiac Killer – Essays on Popular Culture (Edited Collection)
This past spring marked the tenth anniversary of the release of David Fincher’s Zodiac, the legacy of which continues to increase. Viewers and scholars continue to analyze the narrative power of Fincher and screenwriter-producer James Vanderbilt’s journalistic rendition – based on Robert Graysmith’s gripping works of journalism – of the […]