By Yun-hua Chen. Entertaining, and sexy for what it sets out to do, but if Hannah Horvath in Girls could self-assuredly declare herself ‘the voice of a generation,’ Sarah Jo in Sharp Stick wrestles to find a coherent voice of any kind.” The director, actor, and showrunner Lena Dunham, famous […]
The Discomfort of Strangers: Christian Tafdrup’s Speak No Evil (2022)
By Thomas M. Puhr. More akin to an ancient tragedy – one that looks unflinchingly at the terrible depths to which all-too-human people can sink.” Horrible things happen in Christian Tafdrup’s Speak No Evil (2022), but it is not really a horror film. Like Salò (1975) or Martyrs (2008), it […]
The Ugliness Beneath Beauty: An Interview with Ruben Östlund on Triangle of Sadness (2022)
By Yun-hua Chen. When historians talk about [the fall of the Roman Empire], it was a very slow process at the end of which Rome is not the center of Europe or the center of the world anymore. Slowly power is shifting and going somewhere else, so the end of […]
Shower Me with Likes: Hannah Barlow and Kane Senes’ Sissy (2022)
By Thomas M. Puhr. Sissy satisfies on most fronts, eliciting shocked guffaws and legitimate scares in equal measure. It’s easy to imagine it one day becoming something of a cult classic.” Cecilia seems to have it all. Her mental health video podcast, “Sincerely, Cecilia” – which includes episodes with titles […]
House of Darkness and the Post-#metoo Vampire Film: A Conversation with Neil LaBute
By John Talbird. I’ve dabbled in Stoker lore a few times. I adapted Dracula for the stage, I worked on a Syfy series called Van Helsing…. So I’ve tried to stretch that myth as many ways as I can and it amazingly can stretch very far as you’ve probably seen […]
The American Dream as Wasteland: Breaking Bad by Christopher Sharrett
By Tanja Bresan. Sharrett’s deep dive in his book uncovers what drives the show: a similar original sin manifesting in America’s white males with their driving force: toxic white male privilege.” Christopher Sharrett’s recent entry into Wayne State’s University Press’s TV Milestones series examines Breaking Bad, one of the most […]
Resistance to Conformity: Eva Vitija’s Loving Highsmith (2022)
By Melanie Marotta. Ever since I was sixteen or seventeen, I’d – I’d get what is sometimes called creepy ideas.” (05:19-05:25) With Loving Highsmith (2022), writer and director Eva Vitija does what others have refused to do – she resists labeling Highsmith. Instead, by allowing her life to unfold, viewers […]
Navigating History and Audience: An Interview with Ari Folman on Where is Anne Frank (2021)
By Yun-hua Chen. The biggest challenge was how to portray the last seven months of Anne Frank’s life into images that can be accessible to children without going graphically too deep in terms of what really happened. This is how I found the solution through a lot of parallel visual […]
Triggered: The Post-Traumatic Woman and Narratology in HBO’s Westworld
By Keith Clavin and Christopher La Casse. As the show develops, we come to learn that some of the hosts are not ‘forgetting’ the traumas inflicted upon them…. Despite a wipe of their memory caches regarding prior ‘narratives’ (earlier roles they played in the park’s performances), they seem to be […]
A Grim War Tale: Burial
By Elias Savada. Despite the director’s limited ability to handle low-budget action in his debut feature, his much more accomplished follow-up shows he still needs to work with better, less-confusing script material.” British filmmaker Ben Parker only has two features under his belt: The Chamber from 2017 and Burial, now […]