Features

By Christopher Sharrett. The Courier has some touching moments…. but we should keep in mind that there is much more to this story.” As the Soviet Union crumbled in the late 1980s, some U.S. politicians talked about a “peace dividend,” that is, the possibility that money, for years thrown at […]

By Jeremy Carr. Make-believe and storytelling are not only central to the shared and exclusive lives of the film’s fanciful female leads, but are devices ratified and dissected at every turn of the movie’s wonderfully screwy scenario.” There is a repeated refrain heard throughout Adrian Martin’s predictably perceptive commentary on […]

Anderson directing This Sporting Life (1963) with Richard Harris

Marlon Brando in Reflections in a Golden Eye

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, 1970 By Levan Tskhovrebadze. Most of the features of the period are meticulous representations of social wonders and miracles.” In 1964, Czech critic Antonín J. Liehm described Czechoslovak New Wave as a “film miracle.”[i] Later, producer Carlo Ponti successfully introduced to western society cinema […]

By Tony Williams. One in which alert perception and transcendent pleasure in the images offer viewers entry into a new type of cinematic experience.” Shot back-to-back in South Korea with Raining in the Mountain, similar to the earlier complementary productions of The Fate of Lee Khan (1973) and The Valiant […]

Edward G. Robinson and Loretta Young in The Hatchet Man (1932) A Book Review Essay by Matthew Sorrento. Author Philippa Gates doesn’t excuse or shy away from the racist stereotyping of the Chinese but pinpoints issues of complexity.” Though this ambitious study doesn’t mention the issue by name, Philippa Gates’ […]

By Joe McElhaney. I. Fabric and Fog For Visconti, though, the white nights are those of winter, with the electric lights of the film’s urban setting creating one manifestation of white….” Dostoevsky’s white nights are those of a summer, when the sky of Petersburg “was so bright and starry.”(1) The […]

By Greg Burris. A film that manages to peer beyond the horizon at a time when doing so has become impossible for so many of us.” Films do not often bring me to tears. Even less often do those tears come in the first twenty minutes of the movie. Danish […]

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, […]