By Luke Aspell. Taken as lost, City Girl dramatizes its own predicament in reverse. Our Daily Bread, the story of wheat from which this 1930 Fox release was re-cut, would have hymned the cyclical sense of Tustine’s (David Torrence) life of toil. In the light of that perspective, it is […]
Looking at the Landscape of Childhood in Ivan’s Childhood and Germany Year Zero
August 12, 2013
By Devapriya Sanyal. The two great wars of the twentieth century would change everything for humankind once and for all; both materially and spiritually. These wars formed the basis for diverse artistic depictions and found their way into various works both during the war, after the war and in peacetime […]
Old and New: Woody’s Blue Jasmine
August 9, 2013
By Matthew Sorrento. You’d think that Woody Allen would have exorcized it already, after all the complicated romances he’s filmed, of equal parts truth and bitterness. After moving from his early works of farce and confirming his range with tragic romantic comedies in the late 1970s, he let flow a […]
H.G. Wells’ Plethora of Things
August 9, 2013
By Matthew Sorrento. The early American studios acquired literary properties for prestige productions, regardless of what genre grew as a result. The style of classical horror, which emerged in the early 1930s at Universal Studios, appeared largely by accident. By adapting Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the studio […]
Off to the Printers: Film International 63-4 – Double Issue
August 7, 2013
The Engels Project What Engels writes about education, about housing, about employment practices, about health and general social inequality, remains as valid today as it was in 1844, when he wrote the book. Although the material infrastructure of life has of course changed massively for the better, with clean water, […]
Dressed to Kill (1980)
August 7, 2013
By Cleaver Patterson. ‘Masterpiece’ is a word used all to freely in the world of cinema, frequently to describe films which are less than deserving of such praise. So, when one emerges that truly warrants this epithet, like Brian De Palma’s erotic crime classic Dressed to Kill, the power of […]
The Life She Led: Anne Edwards
August 6, 2013
By Patrick McGilligan. Perhaps best known as a biographer of the rich and famous from across the spectrum, Anne Edwards has told the life stories of everyone from screen figures Shirley Temple, Judy Garland, Vivien Leigh and Ronald Reagan (her book Early Reagan was a Pulitzer Prize nominee) to the […]
FILM4 FrightFest 2013 | Returning to London’s Empire Cinema this August
August 6, 2013
By Cleaver Patterson. Running during the August bank holiday weekend each year at the Empire Cinema in London’s Leicester Square, the FILM4 FrightFest has now become a regular fixture on the annual horror film festival circuit. The event, celebrating its fourteenth anniversary this year, will be the biggest yet featuring […]
Alain Badiou’s Cinema (2013)
August 6, 2013
Book Review by Brandon Konecny. Since academia’s interest in cinema as an art form, philosophers have frequently proven to be some of the most insightful voices on the subject. Alain Badiou’s Cinema, accordingly, offers such an instance. For the first time in an English translation, the French philosopher’s over 50 […]
Life with Betty White: Performing the Authentic Proto-Feminist in Pioneering Early Television
August 6, 2013
By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. Betty White has always been ahead of her time. This has been both a blessing and a curse. Most people, even scholars who specialize in television history, have little to no knowledge of the importance of Betty White in early live television, in the invention of […]