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 […]
Nosferatu (2024) – Against Tradwives and Uplift Stories
By J. M. Tyree. More revenants, albeit less interesting ones, are likely to emerge from this weirdly unkillable source, one that has always reached into the uncanny ability of cinema itself to bring dead things back to life.” Robert Eggers’s new version of Nosferatu is not my favorite contemporary vampire […]
Pandemic Dreams: A Trip Elsewhere
By William Blick. A zany yet suspenseful cinematic experience.” I saw the phrase, “after the plague, came the renaissance,” scribbled on a subway station wall and thought it was perhaps somewhat applicable to the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. It seems that there has been a huge surge of creativity […]
Slow-Paced Stakes: The Vourdalak
By Andrew Montiveo. A hauntingly unique addition to the vampire canon, much like the story that inspired it.” When discussing vampiric cinema, Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu inevitably comes to mind. Ironically, the “original” Nosferatu was truly original – a German knockoff of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Stoker’s 1897 novel remains the definitive […]
“Nobody Knows the Trouble I See”: Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths
By Jeremy Carr. Why do some people behave as they do?… It’s the psychosocial terrain explored in Mike Leigh’s latest engaging slice of life….” All somebody has to do is spend about five minutes on social media to see that people are angry. Sometimes, the causes are obvious, widespread, and […]