By Matthew Sorrento. Just what the pinball tribe needs, and offers a whole lot for feel-good indie fans, too.” This new release, aptly titled Pinball, celebrates the game, its ignored legacy, along with an important page in its history. Those (mostly older) who sing the famous hit from Tommy do […]
The Lost Burlesque Auteur: The Films of Lillian Hunt
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. What remains so striking about Hunt’s films is how openly both they and their supporting promotional material clearly sought to appeal to a female audience, well beyond the cliché of the porn-consuming scopophilic male.” While American burlesque cinema flourished in popularity during in the 1940s and 1950s, […]
Borzage in the Beginning: 1922’s Back Pay and The Valley of Silent Men
By Jeremy Carr. Two 1922 Borzage features are now available on Blu-ray/DVD, thanks to the laudable efforts of Undercrank Productions and the Library of Congress.” The arrival of any Frank Borzage film on DVD or Blu-ray is a noteworthy occasion. But when there are two packaged together and they are […]
Tyranny and the Canon: Problems in Todd Field’s Tár
By Christopher Sharrett. As a way of addressing woke culture, it has precious little to say, especially as it irresponsibly conflates the culture with sexual predation, a glaringly different matter, unless the film is aimed at those with grievances about women having too much power…. There is so little music […]
Bargaining with the Devil: Bill Skarsgard and Landon Liboiron’s Soul of a Man
By Dávid Szőke. Eerily beautiful in recapturing the early Gothic film.” Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “Bon-Bon” (1832) is a grotesque retelling of man’s futile endeavor to tempt immortality by making a Faustian contract with the devil. Set in a French wine cellar, the original story pulls the reader into […]
Sonic Violence: Cinematic Rape, Sound, and the Body in Lipstick (Lamont Johnson, 1976)
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. Lipstick stands as a largely underrated film when it comes to the often complex representation of the male rapist in fictional film. Sound often plays second fiddle to the supremacy of the visual in cinema… yet as this example indicates, it can play a significant part in […]
A Dramatic Tribute to a Lost Reality: The Silent Enemy (1930)
By Jeremy Carr. Apparently supporting the film’s well-intentioned attempt at accuracy, Chief Chauncey Yellow Robe, in a sound prologue to this otherwise silent 1930 film, thus urges viewers to not see those performing in the film as actors, but to consider that what is shown ‘is as it always has […]
A Culture of Violence, with Questions Unanswered: Teodora Ana Miha’s La Civil
By Yun-hua Chen. A compelling portrait of not only a society plagued by violence, and one that conditions its members to be indifferent, irresponsive, and numb.” In Northern Mexico, Cielo’s (Arcelia Ramírez) day starts like any mundane morning. Her daughter Laura lovingly makes her up, jokingly self-compliments their beauty (“like […]
Strange Hits: The Birth (and Deaths) of Cocaine Bear
The reviewer confounded, a “poet” responds…. For the few happy stoners who loved Strange Wilderness…. Three of them were back to the multiplex in early ‘08, night after night (while their supply lasted) bringing the only box office before it closed after a week. Late-night conversations, fueled by caffeine, conjured desires for a sequel. Back to […]
Strain in Communities: Three from Berlinale 2023
By Ali Moosavi. The best kind of humour has roots in tragedy.” Silver Haze premiered at the Panorama section of Berlin Film Festival. In most movie productions the starting point is a script (original or adaptation) or at least an idea expanded into a treatment. Sometimes a script is modified […]