By William Blick. The country’s journalists – local or national – are working for all of us. They are our soldiers. And we need to support them.” Rick Goldsmith’s Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink is the third installment in a trilogy of documentaries by Goldsmith about American journalism. It appears […]
Analyzing “on a Forensic Level”: Tim Lucas on the 30th Anniversary of Throat Sprockets
By Jonathan Monovich. When I do commentaries now, I find myself examining films on a more forensic level, responding to individual scenes and shots and taking them apart. My rule with commentaries is that I need to learn something, and I need to know more coming out than I did […]
Object Incidents and the Wilderness of Speech in Howard Hawks’s Ball of Fire (1941)
By George Toles. Expressive objects abound in the world of Ball of Fire. What makes an object cinematically expressive? Let us begin by thinking about a door [which] becomes more charged with significance if we are led to assume that the room behind it contains an armed criminal or a […]
Starring in His Own Nightmare: Joe Begos on Jimmy and Stiggs
By Anela Henley. I never thought I’d be starring in a movie that I made, but just by nature of the circumstances I had to. I think that elevated me as a filmmaker….” Writer-director Joe Begos broke into the indie film scene in 2019 with his third feature Bliss, incorporating doom […]
What is Left Unsaid: Alexandra Simpson’s No Sleep Till
By William Blick. Despite some tedium, well worth viewing as a quiet study in both resignation and defiance.” More of a visual essay or poem, Alexandra Simpson’s independent film, No Sleep Till (2024) which was made on a shoestring, dazzles with crisp shots of lightning and brilliantly colorful night skies […]
Satirizing Horror and Spellbinding the Social Contract: Weapons (2025)
By David Ryan. As a follow-up to Zach Cregger’s horror drama Barbarian (2022), Weapons explores the recursive relationship between personal antagonisms and the erosion of civic trust, staging what Robin Wood identifies as horror’s central tension—the destabilization of the social order….” With Weapons (2025), writer-director Zach Cregger leans on the […]
When Jaws Premiered; or, the Hottest and Coolest Weekend on Record
By Gary D. Rhodes. The great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open.” — Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851) Friday, June 20, 1975. Newspapers report the assassination of mob boss Sam “Momo” Giancana. Gerald Ford authorized his campaign to start fundraising for his presidential bid. Postal workers picketed in Washington, D.C. The House […]
Windows to Survival: Veljko Vidak and Emmanuelle Felce on Cinéma Laika
By Jonathan Monovich. I used to spend a lot of time behind windows looking at a nearby river and the people walking by. Little by little, the windows became my screen. At this time, the only way I was able to survive Karkkila was to spend as much time as […]
Hardened Idols: Hollywood Boozers, Brawlers and Hard-Luck Cases
A Book Review by Maysaa H. Jaber. Adds a human, sometimes tragic face to those at the heart of moviemaking during the Golden Age.” Laura Wagner’s Hollywood Boozers, Brawlers and Hard-Luck Cases: Fifteen Ill-Fated Actors of the Golden Age (McFarland, 2025) takes readers on a journey of rediscovering the life […]
Preview: Shadows in the Sunlight – On the Noir Western
By Anees Aref. Often described as “psychological westerns”, these films eschewed the conventional heroes of the old west for more complicated protagonists, flawed and motivated by darker impulses….” The “Noir-Western” sounds like a contradiction in terms. One associates the western with the 19th century American frontier, wide open vistas, horses, cowboys […]