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Left Hand, Right Hand: Good and Evil in Bill Paxton’s ‘Frailty’ by April Wolfe
[Last year, Musings paid homage to Produced and Abandoned: The Best Films You’ve Never Seen, a review anthology from the National Society of Film Critics that championed studio orphans from the ‘70s...
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The Pixelated Splendor of Michael Mann’s ‘Blackhat’ by Bilge Ebiri
[Last year, Musings paid homage to Produced and Abandoned: The Best Films You’ve Never Seen, a review anthology from the National Society of Film Critics that championed studio orphans from the ‘70s...
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Elvis, Truelove and the Stolen Boy: The Tragic Machismo of Nick Cassavetes’...
[Last year, Musings paid homage to Produced and Abandoned: The Best Films You’ve Never Seen, a review anthology from the National Society of Film Critics that championed studio orphans from the ‘70s...
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3D, Part 1: James Cameron and the Broken Promise of the Third Wave by Vadim...
[Note: This essay is the first in a two-part series on 3D. Part 2, coming soon, will discuss the unexpected peak of 3D as an artistic form. —ed.]It’s not fair to say that James Cameron ruined...
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3D, Part 2: How 3D Peaked At Its Valley by Vadim Rizov
I didn’t expect to spend Thanksgiving Weekend 2018 watching ten 3D movies: marathon viewing is not my favorite experience in general, and I haven’t spent years longing to see, say, Friday the 13th Part...
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Paris sans Agnès by Andrew Lapin
It was morning in Paris when news of Agnès Varda’s death reached the world. On a hunch, I left the apartment I shared with my girlfriend in the city’s 5th arrondissement and walked the 30 minutes, past...
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The Wondrous, Sensuous World of Astralvision by Charles Bramesco
You don’t find it; it finds you, most likely in the dead of night. You can’t sleep, you may or may not be on drugs (you don’t have to be, though it’d be a lot cooler, as they say, if you were), and...
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Mirror, Mirror: When Movie Characters Look Back at Themselves by Sheila O’Malley
“I always feel it behind me. It’s myself. And I follow me. In silence. But I can hear it. Yes, sometimes it’s like I’m chasing myself. I want to escape from myself. But I can’t!” —Peter Lorre as...
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Jonathan Demme’s ‘A Master Builder’ and the Elusive Magic of Bringing Stage...
Criterion’s three-film box-set of the works of Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory—My Dinner With Andre, Uncle Vanya, and A Master Builder—features several supplements, including an interview between the...
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Monster In A Box: What ‘Wonder Boys’ Says About The Writing Process by Daniel...
“A picture used to be a sum of additions. In my case a picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture—then I destroy it. In the end though, nothing is lost: the red I took away from one place turns...
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Telling Lies In America 1985-1995: The Joe Eszterhas Era by Jessica Kiang
“Written by Joe Eszterhas” is a phrase that has not had much of a workout on US cinema screens in over twenty years—and it’s arguable whether the 1997, 19-screen nationwide release of certifiable...
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Evil in the Mirror: John Carpenter’s Revealing ‘Prince of Darkness’ by Joshua...
[Last year, Musings paid homage to Produced and Abandoned: The Best Films You’ve Never Seen, a review anthology from the National Society of Film Critics that championed studio orphans from the ‘70s...
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The Murder Artist: Alfred Hitchcock At The End Of His Rope by Alice Stoehr
“Rope was an interesting technical experiment that I was lucky and happy to be a part of, but I don’t think it was one of Hitchcock’s better films.” So wrote Farley Granger, one of its two stars, in...
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Unbroken Windows: How New York Gentrified Itself On Screen by Jason Bailey
It was 1972, and Lewis Rudin had a problem—specifically, a Johnny Carson problem. Rudin, a real estate developer and committed New Yorker, had founded the Association for a Better New York (ABNY), an...
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It’s Arrested Development: How ‘High Fidelity’ Has Endured Beyond Its...
It’s easy to forget now that at the beginning of 2020, before the pandemic had taken hold of our consciousness, for a brief moment, High Fidelity was back. Not only did Nick Hornby’s debut novel and...
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The Exterminating Angel: On the Wrongness and Righteousness of Abel Ferrara’s...
The most famous shot in Woody Allen’s Manhattan was photographed in the early light near the Queensboro Bridge, with Allen and Diane Keaton sitting on a bench in Sutton Place Park at East 58th Street....
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Christopher Nolan: The Man Who Wasn’t There by Daniel Carlson
1.So, we’ll start with the fact that all movies are make-believe. It’s a bunch of actors on a set, wearing costumes and standing with props picked out by hordes of people you’ll never see, under the...
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‘America’s Not a Country, It’s Just a Business’: On Andrew Dominik’s ‘Killing...
“Shitsville.” That’s the name Killing Them Softly director Andrew Dominik gave to the film’s nameless town, in which low-level criminals, ambitious mid-tier gangsters, nihilistic assassins, and the...
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This is Serious Business You're Fucking with Here: The Films of William...
The way things currently stand, it’s probably safe to say that William Friedkin has retired. Not that there isn’t still a market for his brand of hilarious, opinionated coarseness—as two recent...
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Isn’t Everything Autobiographical?: Ethan Hawke In Nine Films And A Novel by...
When asked during his first ever on-camera interview if he’d like to continue acting, a young Ethan Hawke replied, “I don’t know if it’s going to be there, but I’d like to do it.” He then gives a...
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