By George Toles. “and thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.” —Feste in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, or What You Will, Act 5, Scene 1 In the final scene of Michael Curtiz’s 1950 film, Bright Leaf, the ruthless, defeated protagonist, Brant Royle (Gary Cooper) leaves his home town on […]
A Touch of the Poetry: Orson Welles and Badge of Evil
By James Morrison. Every admirer of Welles – that is, every lover of cinema – will find endless fascination in perusing the point of origin of one of his greatest films.” Touch of Evil (1958) starts with the most famous shot in Orson Welles’s work and one of the most […]
Narrative Rigor in the Nightmare Labyrinth of Backrooms
By Andrew Kolarik. Something that has grown organically over the last few years from quiet beginnings rooted in internet memes and computer gaming…and is startlingly effective at evoking a kind of nameless dread…. The weird netherworld of Backrooms might be what Purgatory is like. Endless repetition of places and memories […]
Cronus Devouring His Children: William Richert’s Winter Kills (1979)
By Robert Guffey. For no matter who eats who first, the grave swallows both father and son in time….” What follows is a brief excerpt from my latest book, Hollywood Haunts the World: An Investigation into the Cinema of Occulted Taboos (Headpress, 2025). This analysis of William Richert’s Winter Kills […]
The Beauty of Looking: Andrew Haigh’s Queer Television Aesthetic
By David Greven. Moving beyond caricature and never trying to goose the audience, Looking consistently offered quiet, introspective scenes like these that took character development and interaction further while maintaining a consistent style. For these reasons, the series remains a resonant touchstone that entices repeat viewings.” The English director Andrew […]
In the Weeds: The Divided City and Its New Cinemas, 1920-1980
A Book Review by John Talbird. Instead of throwing a heaping helping of film titles at us, substituting lists and anecdote for real analysis, each chapter takes a deep dive into one specific movie, contextualizing the film with the real-world effects of white flight, government abandonment of urban locales, urban […]
Horror Film Ascendant
By Gary D. Rhodes. 2026 is the watershed year of the bloodshed film. The sleep of reason has produced monsters, worlds of gods and monsters, new and old, now lauded by all except the most unreasonable amongst us.” To face evil and survive, or, for that matter, to face evil […]
She Didn’t Do It: A High School Teacher’s Thoughts on Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama
By Thomas M. Puhr. As someone with no direct experience with such atrocities, I can only imagine how painful it would be for a survivor to walk into a screening and not know what they’re in for….” I’d been teaching for five or six years when I experienced my first—and, […]
Reclaiming Cinema History: Alexandra Heller-Nicholas on 1000 Women in Horror (Shudder)
By Ellie Dean. We have very clear socially constructed, stereotypical ideas of what girlhood means, what femme adolescence means, what motherhood means, etcetera, and horror works so well as a forum to explore and deconstruct these cliches because it defamiliarizes them, makes them strange, and at its best transgresses and […]
A Clarifying Distance: Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown, Global Art Cinema, and the European Union
By James Morrison. My films are meant as polemical statements against the American ‘barrel-down’ cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance instead of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead […]