By Anton Bitel. In Japan, Christianity is a minority religion of only marginal significance to the nation’s culture, and accordingly Japanese films that focus on Christianity tend to do so as a means to an end. While Norifumi Suzuki’s nunsploitation shocker School of the Holy Beast (Seiju gakuen, 1974), for […]
Female Prisoner #701 Scorpion: Beast Stable (Joshuu sasori: Kemono-beya, 1973)
By Anton Bitel. If ever proof were needed that genre is what you make of it, then one only need look to Japan’s ‘pink’ cinema of the 1970s, where the lowest of exploitation subgenres was being approached with the highest of artistic sensibilities, disinterring unexpectedly exquisite treasures from the trash. […]
Army of Shadows (1969)
By Tim Palmer. Few directors have enjoyed a contemporary renaissance like Jean-Pierre Melville. Over the last five years his career has been newly appraised and celebrated ― especially in the English language ― while many of his films have received meticulous restorations, and at last been re-released. Today, Melville’s reputation […]
Isolationism in Dead Man Walking
By Dustin Griffin, Honorable Mention in the 2006 Frank Capra Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Film Criticism. Dead Man Walking (1995) is about religious faith and the societal issues surrounding the death penalty; the film deconstructs the issue of forgiveness as it is taught in the Old Testament, with its […]
The Invention of the Western Film: A Cultural History of the Genre’s First Half-Century, Scott Simmon, 2003
Book Review by Daniel Herbert. Within a discussion of Frederick Jackson Turner’s ideas about the frontier and their bearing upon the Western film genre, Scott Simmon notes that by 1890 the American West was essentially “closed” (page 156). Although it is true that the expanse of the United States had […]
BFI Film Classics: Belle de Jour, Michael Wood, (2000)
Book Review by Daniel Herbert. Michael Wood begins his book on Belle de Jour by characterizing Luis Buñuel’s style as “a form of impatience” (page 8). One might assume that, at a mere seventy-seven pages, Wood might require a similar impatience to breeze through the intricacies and enigmas that abound […]