By Ali Moosavi. I knew that I didn’t want to see violence. I feel like I’ve seen enough sexual violence in cinema…. I was like how can we make a movie about the threat of that. And the threat of that should be enough to feel scared.” The young Australian […]
Pastiche and Performance: Barbara Stanwyck in All I Desire (Douglas Sirk, 1953)
By Catherine Russell. The cinema exalts the role at the same time that it destroys the actor.” —Edgar Morin, The Stars Stanwyck made two films with Douglas Sirk in the 1950s—All I Desire (1953) and There’s Always Tomorrow (1955)—in which she gives two of her finest performances. In both films […]
Florid in a Good Way: Herbert Brenon’s The Spanish Dancer (1923)
By Thomas Gladysz. With a range of pictures to his credit – fantasies, adventure films, melodramas, historical epics – there are those who feel Brenon was a director without a defined, or at least a dynamic, style. There is truth to that assertion…. Adaptability, however, shouldn’t detract from an appreciation […]
Different Types of Love: An Interview with Todd Haynes on May December
By Ali Moosavi. I think on the one hand love is the way we enter into relationships which organize and structure our lives and come with the society either condoning of those choices or social opposition to them…. But also Roland Barthes the French writer and theorist wrote a lover’s […]
Never Change: Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla (2023)
By Thomas M. Puhr. A portrait of how the celebrity machine thrives on packaging and preserving its subjects as doll-like children who are denied the luxury of developing discernible inner selves.” The opening chords from Alice Coltrane’s “Going Home” accompany an overhead shot of two pristinely pedicured feet creeping along […]
She Has Overcome: Joan Baez I Am a Noise
By Elias Savada. A lovely curtain call, offering time for Joan to frame how she ultimately crushed her life-long demons. It’s a heartbreaking journey into the horrifying past and a heartwarming walk into a future of forgiveness.” I always envisioned this legendary folk musician and activist as the Baby Boomer […]
Never Getting Over This: Miles Joris-Peyrafitte on The Good Mother
By Ali Moosavi. [Hilary Swank’s character] is not a person who’s grieving the way that we think she should when we meet her…. It’s very easy for us to think that’s not how she should be feeling and grieving. I think in a movie about grief that was a compelling […]
Birdeater: An Australian Masculinity Run Amok
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. Sydney filmmakers Jim Weir and Jack Clark turn the mirror inwards to examine the conditions where, if left unchecked, certain kinds of male social relationships can grant violence against women a space to flourish.” Launched in 2021, the Australian government-supported Our Watch organization rolled out the “Doing […]
Australian Horror Now
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. As a diverse and multicultural country, I would like to see us producing horror that represents the wide range of storytelling styles and lived experiences that come together to make this country what it is.” –Isabel Peppard “It was a difficult decision to make it even using […]
To Love the Uncanny – Haunted by Vertigo: Hitchcock’s Masterpiece Then and Now
A Book Review by Dávid Szőke. The book’s eleven chapters approach the master’s film from broad, yet intersecting angles, allowing the reading and cinematic audience into the colourful patterns that weave the filmic narrative threads into a magnetically composite unity.” “Scottie, do you believe that someone out of the past, […]