Lola Montès (Max Ophüls, 1955) By Jeremy Carr. This deceptively uncomplicated language in fact sustains some of the most profound observations on cinema ever recorded.” Anyone who has read V. F. Perkins’s influential 1972 text Film as Film will find much that is familiar in V. F. Perkins on Movies, […]
British Cinema Talks – and Screams!: Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929) and Murder (1929)
Murder! By Tony Williams. Kino Lorber has continued to fill the gap left by other boutiques by providing both classic and popular films with informative audio-commentaries and features unlike its once prestigious competitor. Despite technological developments that have resulted in far better viewing copies than occurred when the films were […]
Conspiracy Melodrama to Psychological Tragedy: From JFK to Nixon
Nixon (Oliver Stone, 1995) By Carl Freedman. In the metaphorical terms of Nixon’s political family romance, we might say that Lincoln is the ancestral forefather and Eisenhower the father. Kennedy, then, is the sibling (the younger sibling, indeed), and the 1960 presidential contest can be understood as a kind of symbolic […]
Cherishing the Legendary Haruomi Hosono: No Smoking
By Matthew Fullerton. Charming in that it strikes a fine balance of chronology and intimate, and often amusing, interludes of today’s seventy-something Hosono.” Japan’s Brian Eno, Neil Young, and Mark Mothersbaugh are just a few of the allusions bandied about by diehard fans of musician, singer-songwriter, composer, producer, and all-round […]
Majestic Visual Style and Inimitable Dialogue – Fuller at Fox: Five Films 1951-1957
Fixed Bayonets! (1951) By Tony Williams. Viewers should gain plenty from seeing Fuller’s majestic visual style and hearing his inimitable dialogue in this special collection.” Eureka’s distinctive series has made a very worthy addition to their acclaimed series with five films by the great Samuel Fuller whose significance appears on […]
Lulu Forever: the 2020 Louise Brooks FilmPodium Retrospective (Zurich)
Fritz Kortner and Louise Brooks in Pandora’s Box (G.W. Pabst, 1929) By Thomas Gladysz. Louise Brooks has been described as a “cult actress”…. But as both the Melbourne and Zurich retrospectives show, there is a good deal more to this singular performer.” Last October, the Melbourne Cinémathèque in Melbourne, Australia […]
Prometheus on Netflix: How The Trial of the Chicago 7 Sidelines a Black Panther’s Struggle
By Greg Burris. Whereas the previous films sought to emphasize Seale’s struggle, The Trial of the Chicago 7 diminishes it. In Sorkin’s directorial hands, Seale’s chains are turned into a plot devise, and they function primarily to bolster the film’s main concern: a war within the white left.” My initial […]
A Legacy All Her Own – Geraldine Chaplin: The Gift of Film Performance by Steven Rybin
Doctor Zhivago (David Lean, 1965) A Book Review Essay by Tanja Bresan. I’ve been wondering about the immortality of the soul” –Geraldine Chaplin in A Countess from Hong Kong (1967) How does one find independence in cinema when your own father is cinema immortalized? Steven Rybin’s new book Geraldine Chaplin: […]
Revisiting Wiseman’s Law and Order (1969) in the Era of Black Lives Matter
By Nilita Vachani. The film’s visual evidence speaks to the systemic racism that’s at the heart of the country’s self-reckoning today. What insights does the film contain for law enforcement half a century later?” The large white cop holds the small black woman’s neck in a tight chokehold. Four men […]
Werner Schroeter and Underground Film
The Death of Maria Malibran (1972) By Peter Valente. Werner Schroeter has carried the torch for free expression in cinematic art, and shares with many of these underground filmmakers, particularly Jack Smith, a desire for excess and theatricality. But it was a freedom that was won by overcoming obstacles.” Werner […]