A Book Review by Jeremy Carr. While Klawans routinely sings the praises of Sturges, he also expresses an evenhanded awareness of certain shortcomings, making this critical analysis from Columbia University Press a perceptive, exceptionally well-composed and earnest evaluation.” Lest there be any doubt about Stuart Klawans’s regard for the subject […]
Ruminations on the American Haunted House Genre – The Newest TV Additions are…Canadian
SurrealEstate (CTV Sci Fi, 2021- ) and Three Pines (Prime Video, 2022- ) * By Melanie A. Marotta. “Houses don’t kill people. People kill people.” –Armand Gamache, Three Pines (2022; episode 3) On October 25, 2022, the Syfy channel’s social media accounts posted a video of Tim Rozon (Luke Roman) […]
Revealing the Tommy Guns: An Interview with Carlos Conceição
By Yun-hua Chen. Most of my films are about male characters going through some sort of coming of age or the process of becoming adults even if they are at different moments of life…. When you start talking about vulnerability, you can extend into different directions.” Winner of the Europa […]
James Baldwin Abroad (and on Film)
By John Talbird. Love has never been a popular movement. And no one has ever wanted, really, to be free. The world is held together…by the love and passion of a very few people. Otherwise, of course, you can despair. You can walk down the street of any city…and look […]
No Escape – Fate in Film: A Deterministic Approach to Cinema
A Book Review by Dávid Szőke. Author Thomas M. Puhr concentrates on the cinematic narrative of predestination, our futile attempts to escape it, and our fear that, after all, forces greater than us direct both our internal lives and our interactions with our outside world. The book brilliantly argues that […]
Spoiler Alert: Bring a Few Hankies
By Elias Savada. Filled with keen observant and honest life revelations that warms the heart before the moments of despair, Spoiler Alert offers up a warming cup of hot cocoa in a tragicomic setting.” As terminal illness-driven comedy-dramas go, Spoiler Alert is a light, semi-sweet step up from any of […]
Unifying Chaos: What’s Up Connection
By Jeremy Carr. Nearly everyone encountered expresses some sort of erratic behavior, which does give the film a sense of genuine spontaneity and hysterical possibility.” There is a popular social media trend where someone posts a seemingly innocuous video in which something unexpected then occurs. This is usually accompanied by […]
Slashing Names Off that Naughty List: Tommy Wirkola’s Violent Night (2022)
By Thomas M. Puhr. The setup is little more than window dressing for a number of set pieces (some clever, others tedious) in which our hero kicks major ass, John McClane-style.” After about 1,000 years, even the most glamorous job loses some of its luster. Such is the experience of […]
“I think we killed off Jean-Luc Godard”: An Interview with Christophe Honoré
By Ali Moosavi. It is not that Jean-Luc Godard is better than Xavier Dolan. That is impossible to say, but their idea of cinema is not the same. Maybe the world today doesn’t need cinema anymore.” Christophe Honoré is a multi-talented French artist. He is a novelist, actor, director of […]
Superfan Service: Patrick Read Johnson’s 5-25-77 (2022)
By Thomas M. Puhr. Not unlike the rough cut of a certain sci-fi epic, 5-25-77 exhibits a scrappy charm. Still, I’d leave this one to superfans and nostalgia junkies only.” “Most of this is true. The rest is even truer,” the opening text to Patrick Read Johnson’s 5-25-77 (2022) declares. […]