By Jacob Mertens. The Raid 2 opens with a wide shot of a man kneeling beside a freshly dug grave. Facing his inevitable death, the film captures him as a small creature unable to influence the pendulum swing of fate. When the camera moves in, viewers see that this poor […]
Out of the Furnace: The Question of Adversarial Cinema
April 8, 2014
By Christopher Sharrett. I did not see Scott Cooper’s Out of the Furnace during its initial run some months ago, in part because I thought little of Cooper’s Crazy Heart (2009), and anticipated, incorrectly, that the film would adapt Thomas Bell’s important (although not very distinctive) novel Out of This […]
Tomorrow’s Machine: An Interview with Filmmaker Caradog James
April 8, 2014
By Paul Risker. Caradog James’ sophomore feature, the science-fiction drama The Machine (2013), shares its genre sibling’s habitual tendency to hypothesise and present visions of the future. In keeping with its parental heritage, The Machine offers a bleak vision that merges the future of tomorrow with yesterday’s past. It takes the present-day […]
The Superficial Ugliness of The Great Beauty
April 6, 2014
By Daniel Lindvall. “Do you know why I eat only roots? Because roots are important,” explains a 104-year-old nun to the greying author and playboy Jep Gambardella, main character of Paolo Sorrentino’s recent Oscar winner, The Great Beauty. Forty years ago Gambardella wrote the roman à clef of his generation. […]
Captain America: The Winter Soldier, or, Nothing You Believe is True
April 5, 2014
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. I’m teaching a class right now in comic book movies, partly to trace the history of the genre from the 1940s on – when they began as Saturday morning serials – and partly to discover, if I could, why these films have moved to the mainstream […]
Demise and Redemption: Throne of Blood and The Hidden Fortress on Criterion
April 4, 2014
By Matthew Sorrento. To regard the “First Murder” of the Judeo-Christian tradition as a parable on fratricide is to miss the greater point. The brother turning on his own does channel an uncanny dread, and yet the tale comments on the universality of the crime: how any murder is like […]
Alain Robbe-Grillet’s L’Immortelle Finally Released on DVD and Blu-ray
April 2, 2014
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Many years ago, in 1969, when I was working as a writer for Life magazine under editor Thomas Thompson, one of the highlights of my working week came on Monday, when the screening schedule of newly released films would be distributed throughout the office, and we’d […]
Crowded Out, Fenced In: Pirjo Honkasalo’s Concrete Night
April 1, 2014
By Daniel Lindvall. François Truffaut’s classic first film, The 400 Blows, ends on a beach. Antoine Doinel (played by Jean-Pierre Léaud, who must have been about 14 when the film was shot) has just run away from a borstal in the middle of a game of football. The film leaves […]
Joe – A SXSW Review
April 1, 2014
By Jacob Mertens. To call Joe anything but a return to form for director David Gordon Green would be a disservice. And that has nothing to do with how terrible his recent spate of films have been, save for the uneven but affecting Prince Avalanche (2013). Instead, it has to […]
The Secret World of the Warrior Elites: 007, Fukuyama and Tom Jones
March 31, 2014
By Rajko Radovic. If you have a message, send it by Western Union! That was the legendary answer Hollywood bigwigs would fire at those among suspiciously mortal critics, usually foreign or pinko, who were wondering whether or not the pictures they were making had anything to say. On a certain […]