By Gary D. Rhodes. It is so very easy to hobgoblinize a film, even if one needs a thesaurus to ferret out an abundance of negative adjectives. And yet, I am struck by the sheer number of blatant errors and falsehoods about FáD that mainstream critics have relied upon.” Todd […]
The Unmanageable Maid
By Robert K. Lightning. Whether through indifference, innuendo, or caustic commentary, she makes her opinions apparent to her employers and, essentially, subverts any pretense of absolute authority over her. She is effectively unmanageable.” In honor of the fiftieth anniversary of its publication in 1973, I recently pulled Donald Bogle’s Toms, […]
“Night Wanderings” with Nosferatu (2024)
By Gary D. Rhodes. Few filmmakers are as capable of waking the dead, and of transporting us to them, than Robert Eggers, the Charon of American cinema.” “He is coming,” we learn of Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) during Robert Eggers’ new film, just as we have heard for many years […]
The Bombardment (2021): a Prologue, a Post-mortem, and an Antenarrative
By David Ryan. The film strikes deeply when focusing on the losses we share when innocent people, families, and children perish through the actions of tyrants and the mistakes of gallant, smart but altogether remarkably ordinary people.” A Prologue A tragic film dealing with intimate themes about the effects of […]
The Phantom (1931): Hollywood’s First Independent Horror Movie
By Gary D. Rhodes. Even if it is not at the artistic level of many of those produced in the months, years, and decades that followed, The Phantom exemplifies ambition over vision. Its speed of production placed it in a pole position, independent of competition, let alone studios, a position […]
“The Invisible Man”: Race in Horror Films
INTERVIEW: “Racial representation in visual horror fictions have also become a trope in the way that audiences do not expect to see minorities—or at least not very often and not alive for very long. Due to long-standing tropes, minorities in visual horror fictions have become, in a sense, invisible.”
Hollywood’s Star of Stars – Ferocious Ambition: Joan Crawford’s March to Stardom
A Book Review Essay by Jeremy Carr. More than a mere biography with chronological touchstones and historical anecdotes (though there are plenty of those, and they’re fascinating), it is also a psychological profile delving into the inner motivations of its subject, and a lavishly illustrated assessment of how a Golden […]
Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion: M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap
By James Slaymaker. Shyamalan’s careful misdirection reveals much about his protagonist, the society he lives in, and the capacity of cinematic form to perpetuate dominant cultural values.” Spoilier Alert In the final sequence of M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap (2024), there’s a moment when Cooper Adams (Josh Hartnett), a serial murderer […]
Steven Zaillian’s Ripley: Neo-Noir or Revisionary Noir?
By M. Keith Booker. Many aspects of Zaillian’s series, both thematic and visual, make it an almost perfect example of neo-noir. Yet, in other ways, Ripley goes beyond the original noir cycle in ways that are reminiscent of the best revisionary noir films.” In my new book American Noir Film: […]
The Substance is a Documentary
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. As far as emotional fidelity is concerned, The Substance is a documentary. No other film I have ever seen so perfectly captures my subjective experience of the culturally enforced dissociation that happens en masse when, as a woman, your body starts to age.” I recently turned 50. […]