By Cleaver Patterson. In the rarefied world of cinema, a place frequently lost in a strong belief of its own self-aggrandisement, horror films are generally considered the poor relation. Designed in the main to terrify they are often relegated straight to dvd, unless you’re talking big budget teenage slashfests like the Scream and Final […]
Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)
By Jacob Mertens. Sown from the fabric of tragedy, Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild ravages through the primeval swamp of the Louisianan bayou with a camera that shakes and slips out of focus. The characters construct shanties from scraps of metal and forgotten rubbish, while their old homes […]
Central Thematic Conflict in 21 Grams and Babel
By Anna Weinstein. Screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga is best known for writing ensemble films about the effects of tragedy on human life—how tragedy can both pull apart and bring together. His scripts present a kaleidoscopic view of human interconnection, that people across cultures, borders, and class systems are, when all is […]
The Aura in the age of New Materialism
By Jonathan Rozenkrantz. When Walter Benjamin proclaimed the aura lost, he was hardly writing in grief. Being a Marxist, he saw in the means of technical reproduction – primarily manifested in the cinematic medium – art’s final liberation from the bonds of ritual and tradition. The “aura” – basically signifying […]
Killer Joe: A Family (Dis)Member(ed)
By Matthew Sorrento. When settling down for an evening of trash, theater audiences have a comfortable distance from the content. This decidedly highbrow group – does anyone in the US, save the “most cultured,” support the dying art of drama anymore? – may delight in the bizarre, while they’d flip […]
Subverting Capitalism and Blind Faith: Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs
By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. “It’s not a likable movie. Even me, myself, I hate the film.” (Pascal Laugier) Pascal Laugier’s radically experimental horror film Martyrs (2008) is a persuasive and explosive leveling of capitalism, which is not limited to materialism, the Catholic Church, the cynical genre of torture porn, and […]
When it soars it is a thing of beauty
By Jacob Mertens. “If you make yourself more than just a man, if you devote yourself to an ideal, and if they can’t stop you, then you become something else entirely… A legend, Mr. Wayne.” (Henri Ducard, Batman Begins [2005]) If there is one thing Christopher Nolan understands better than […]
Wanderers and Nomads in Edinburgh
By Yun-hua Chen. This year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival (20 June-1 July, 2012), led by the new artistic director Chris Fujiwara, differed from last year in a remarkable way. It broke from the previous year’s strong link with University of Edinburgh and strategically placed itself closer to other art forms […]
Savages (2012)
July 25, 2012
By Bryan Nixon. Oliver Stone, the 80’s and 90’s king of aggressively provocative and political American filmmaking (Platoon, Natural Born Killers, JFK), has been directing lackluster films with monstrous ambition over the last decade (Alexander, Wall Street 2, W.). The problem is that he has become regrettably soft in his […]
Fascism for the 21st Century
By Daniel Lindvall. Without the help of a time machine, watching the The Dark Knight Rises on a big screen will probably remain the closest I’ll ever get to what experiencing a Wagnerian propaganda spectacle in 1930’s Berlin must have felt like. It is not just the celebration of the […]