By Jacob Mertens. Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) drifts in zero gravity, curled into a fetal pose with eyes closed, as if the decompression chamber was a womb. She has withstood an onslaught of space debris that wiped out her fellow astronauts and as she hovers above the ground, sunlight […]
The forced Real of (in)humanity: A brief Lacanian critique of The Act of Killing
February 24, 2014
By Mats Carlsson. Like all great documentaries, The Act of Killing demands another way of looking at reality. It starts as a dreamscape, an attempt to allow the perpetrators to reenact what they did, and then something truly amazing happens. The dream dissolves into nightmare and then into bitter reality. […]
Les Cousins (1959)
February 21, 2014
By Christopher Neilan. In 1958, twenty-seven year old cahiers du cinema critic Claude Chabrol spent his wife’s inheritance money shooting his debut feature Le beau Serge, a Hitchcock influenced morality piece starring Gérard Blain and Jean-Claude Brialy. The film, which earned the best director prize from the Locarno film festival, […]
“Illusion and Reality” Films: Genre and Apotheosis
February 18, 2014
By Brian Russell Graham. A great many of the most popular films of recent decades are characterized by a character’s struggle to separate illusory worlds from ordinary reality. Examples range from the Wachowskis’ The Matrix (1999) to Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of […]
America’s Acts of Killing: Robert Greenwald on Drone Wars
February 18, 2014
By Matthew Sorrento. Bizarre, shocking, yet filled with truth, Joshua Oppenheimer‘s The Act of Killing continues to gather acclaim. This Oscar-nominated record of routine killings of Communists in Indonesia during 1965-66 haunts viewers. As a filmed document about memory – the paramilitary gangsters (“free men”) discuss on camera how they […]
Autumn Sonata (1978)
February 15, 2014
By Jeremy Carr. “A mother and a daughter. What a terrible combination of feelings and confusion and destruction.” So says Eva (Liv Ullmann) toward the end of Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata (1978). More than any other line of dialogue, in what is a remarkably written film, this gets to the […]
Shackled (Belenggu): A Well-Mounted Disappointment
February 11, 2014
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. I wish I could say kinder things about this film, especially since it’s clear that this was a labor of love on the part of its director, Upi Avianto, an Indonesian genre filmmaker with numerous other films to her credit, such as Looking For Love in […]
The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
February 7, 2014
By William Repass. Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street begins with a simple equation: money is a drug. “Enough of this shit will make you invincible,” enthuses Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), as he leans in to snort a line of coke in extreme close-up, “you’ll be able to conquer the […]
Hollywood Exiles in Europe
February 3, 2014
A Book Review by Wheeler Winston Dixon. Let’s just start by saying that this is an excellent book. I get stacks of new titles every day from publishers, and it takes a lot for a book to really jump out of the pile and interest me, particularly on a topic […]
American Hustle (2013)
January 31, 2014
By Jacob Mertens. David O. Russell’s American Hustle begins with a title card stating “Some of this actually happened,” and for once a Hollywood film makes an honest claim to real events. Upon closer examination though, Russell had little choice but to say so. His film features well-developed characters, but […]