How Louise Brooks Came to Play Lulu: A New Look at a Legend

By Thomas Gladysz. For decades, it’s been said G. W. Pabst cast Louise Brooks in Pandora’s Box after having seen her in A Girl in Every Port. It’s an assertion repeated so often it has become fact, part of the legend which surrounds not only the acclaimed German film, but […]

From Sound to Observation: Shuntaro Uchida on Incinerator

By Yun-hua Chen. I felt that my job was to interfere with that as little as possible.” –Shuntaro Uchida Ten-year-old Kozue (Karin) feels out of place at school. She doesn’t have any peer to talk to and likes tossing randomly procured objects into the school’s incinerator. The university student Jinta […]

“It’s About Time”: Anja Breien’s Wives Trilogy

By Thomas M. Puhr. By turns funny, subversive, and formally playful, they are lovely paeans to female friendship.” A few years ago, I reconnected with a college friend on social media. Our online conversations were pleasant enough, but I felt a pang of anxiety when we set a date to […]

Verity on the Move: Kevin Macdonald on The Runner

By Ellie Dean. I wanted to show what it’s really like on Kentish Town Road, which is my high street in London—and a pretty grimy, gritty place. There’s something really fun about putting a movie star into that kind of place and watching the reactions of the real people as […]

The Independent Voice: Steal This Story, Please!

By Anees Aref. In a time where the U.S. President declares the media as the ‘enemy of the people,’ openly profits from his office, kidnaps foreign heads of state, and wages an unprovoked (and many would say illegal) war against Iran, we need people like Amy Goodman.” At the beginning […]

Marion Davies Delights in The Cardboard Lover (1928)

By Jeremy Carr. Robert Z. Leonard knows what he has to work with and makes the most of Davies’s giddy promise.” William Randolph Hearst was famously perturbed by what he saw as the obvious and unflattering resemblance between himself and the captivating, though oftentimes repellant, character of Charles Foster Kane. […]

“Golden Age Thinking”: Kent Jones on Late Fame

By Jonathan Monovich. I find that the past lives in the present. Like Faulkner said, ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past’…. Whenever there have been attempts to return to zero, they’ve amounted to nothing. —Kent Jones In the deeply personal My Voyage to Italy (1999), Martin Scorese […]