By Rayson K. Alex and S. Susan Deborah. Salma Monani is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at Gettysburg College, Pennsylvania, United States of America, and currently a Carson Fellow at Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany. As an environmental humanities scholar, Monani’s primary research in ecocinema studies is informed […]
Miss Sharon Jones!: Success and Other Crises
By Kate Hearst. Renewed interest in black female singers sparked the release last year of two documentaries focused on voices of the Civil Rights movement: What Happened, Miss Simone? about the late soul singer and activist Nina Simone, and Mavis! featuring gospel singer Mavis Staples and the Staple Singers. In […]
“A Big Job”: A Conversation About The Battle of Algiers with Saadi Yacef
October 22, 2016
By John Duncan Talbird. The Battle of Algiers (1966) is one of the essential postcolonial texts of the 20th century. It complicates many of the assumptions that too often get taken for granted even now, fifty years later: the essentialism of race, the terrorist/freedom fighter binary, the ethics and efficacy of torture […]
The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger (2016)
October 19, 2016
By Mark James. Most of us probably remember John Berger as the host of Ways of Seeing, a four-part 1972 television series that he created for BBC where Berger educated the nation about looking at art, effectively demonstrating that one can discuss the so called ‘Old Masters’ in ways that […]
In the Season of the Witch: Victor Matellano on Vampyres
By Sotiris Petridis. Set in an English manor inhabited by two lesbian vampires and a man imprisoned in the basement, Vampyres enlivens the familiar territory with pulsating raw eroticism, wicked sado-masochism and bloody, creative gore. The lives of the vampires are upended when a trio of campers come upon the […]
Command and Control: Is Our Nuclear Luck Running Out?
October 15, 2016
By Elias Savada. I had nearly forgotten about that nuclear blip a third of a century ago, the one which is the core of Robert Kenner’s new feature Command and Control. It was a missile crisis that nearly wiped out Arkansas and a nice chunk of the United States. So, are […]
“Just a White Dot, Remember?”: An Interview with Justin S. Lee
October 12, 2016
By Tom Ue. Justin S. Lee is a Student Academy Award-nominated writer/director with an MFA from the USC School of Cinematic Arts. His storytelling roots began at an early age in childhood, when he grew up in the foreign cityscape of Taipei, Taiwan. Unable to speak its language and truly fit in, he […]
The Man Who Shot Oliver: An Interview with Cinematographer Ossie Morris
By David A. Ellis. The late notable cinematographer Oswald Norman Morris was born on 22nd November 1915 in Ruislip. Morris started his career as a clapper boy at Wembley Studios in 1932, making quota quickies, which were made in a week to meet the British quota. He was offered an […]
Indignity in Sweet Mode: A Man Called Ove
October 7, 2016
By Gary M. Kramer. The title character of A Man Called Ove would probably not see the heartwarming Swedish film, A Man Called Ove, adapted from Fredrik Backman’s national bestseller (2012, English translation in 2013). He is far too cynical, and would call this gentle comedy-drama “mush nonsense.” Still, this […]
A Multicultural Magnificent Seven for Our Times
October 6, 2016
By Kate Hearst. Antoine Fuqua’s The Magnificent Seven showcases a multiracial cast of personalities who collaborate to defeat a murderous robber baron on the American frontier. The overall cinematic spectacle of teamwork among this star-studded collection of lone gunslingers, led by Denzel Washington, is as deeply satisfying as the 1960 […]