By Thomas M. Puhr. Franklin Ritch’s feature debut hinges on its ability to make you think you’re watching one kind of movie before becoming another, and then another. If you like cerebral, speculative science-fiction, then you should seek this one out.” The first lines of dialogue in The Artifice Girl […]
The Quiet Girl and Reflections on the Season
By Christopher Sharrett. The conclusion of the film makes a basic point: the biological family is often inauthentic, the authentic family a matter of individual will, with affection created by need, and a deep kinship not often subject to accidents of flesh.” Colm Bairéad’s The Quiet Girl wasn’t ignored during […]
A Woman on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown: Repulsion by Jeremy Carr
A Book Review by Dávid Szőke. A fascinating study that examines themes mostly, but not exclusively, central to feminist visual representations, without losing sight of the paradoxes that shade contemporary approaches to Polanski’s work in the light of the #meToo movement.” “We are clay […] and nothing is real for […]
“Sin Lust Evil” in America: Louise Brooks and the Exhibition History of Pandora’s Box (1929)
By Thomas Gladysz. Though celebrated today, Pandora’s Box experienced one of the more troubled exhibition histories of just about any film of its time.” Today, Pandora’s Box is considered one of the great films of the silent era, as well as a masterpiece of Weimar cinema. It is still regularly […]
What’s the “Something”?: Pierre Földes’ Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (2022)
By Thomas M. Puhr. Based on six Haruki Murakami short stories, writer-director Pierre Földes’ feature debut is an invigorating curiosity, a much-needed reminder of the emotional depths to which animation can take us.” “What you see with your eyes is not necessarily real,” a character reflects in Blind Willow, Sleeping […]
Broken Windows: Decline and Reimagination in Cinematic New York
A Book Review by John Talbird. A sound, focused, and thorough examination of a fairly compressed period of time.” On October 30, 1975, New York’s Daily News ran an article with the banner headline, “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” Of course, President Gerald Ford never said such a thing, few […]
The Other Side: An Interview with Sophie Linnenbaum on The Ordinaries
By Yun-hua Chen. We wanted to lean into this classic world of superheroes and create this contrast between the supposed superhero and the ordinaries, which is what this film is about – what is ordinary, what is special? And we try to bring these elements together in this title.” –Sophie […]
Beyond New Romantic: Documentary Filmmaker Kevin Hegge on Tramps! and London’s Subcultural History
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. I’ve always found it really irritating how people have this default setting to complain about younger generations, when it’s young people who cultivate change and move things forward. That idea of movement is what the movie is really about.” –Kevin Hegge A superficial glance back at the […]
Fame with a Tarnish: Mickey Reece’s Country Gold (2022)
By Jonathan Monovich. Chips away at complex meaning and eventually strikes it, despite the occasional distracting surrealism.” Country Gold begins in a reverse Wizard of Oz fashion, transitioning from color to black-and-white. The story starts with Troyal Brux (Mickey Reece), a playful take on Garth Brooks, professing his idolization of […]
Approaching the Unknowable “Others” – Comic Drunks, Crazy Cults, and Lovable Monsters: Bad Behavior on American Television
A Book Review by M. Sellers Johnson. While Diffrient advances contemporary television scholarship…readers will also find this book to be light, entertaining, and likely relatable to modern TV consumers’ apparent affinity for dubious moral ethics.” Within our televised small screens and the world they inhabit, bad behavior persists in social […]