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The Craftsman’s Hands: How Samson Raphaelson Shaped Classic Hollywood by...
The biblical character of Samson was a man divided. The story goes that he was chosen by the almighty before birth to be separate and consecrated from those around him. He would lead the Israelites to...
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Long After Midnight: The Curious Story of Shock Treatment, the Rocky Horror...
Last year, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, celebrated its 40th anniversary, a landmark marked by a cast reunion, online retrospectives, a new Blu-ray edition of the film, and news of a planned TV remake...
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The Columbine Movie in the Age of Mass Shootings by Scott Tobias
“You know there’s others like us out there.” —Eric, ElephantOn April 20th, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold executed a massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado, killing 12 of their fellow...
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No Future: How Richard Linklater and Eric Bogosian’s ‘SubUrbia’ Foreshadowed...
Disappointment is powerful and insidious. When an object of desire slips away, particularly something we believe we deserve, the sense of loss can be intense. It’s not that we failed to get something;...
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Portrait of the Artist: Magic Mike XXL By K. Austin Collins
To start his day, Jerry Mulligan, the hero of Vincente Minnelli’s 1951 musical An American in Paris, does a curious thing. He’s an ex-G.I. in Paris who lives in a studio above a restaurant and café....
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The Pragmatic Rebellion of Roger Corman’s The Trip by Jessica Ritchey
Pre-production for a movie rarely involves dropping acid, yet in the spirit of due diligence, producer/director Roger Corman spent a weekend in Big Sur, California doing this essential prep work for...
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Electroma or: It Became Necessary for Daft Punk to Destroy Themselves in...
When Daft Punk’s Electroma was unveiled in the Directors’ Fortnight at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, it was met with at best a muted response. Writing for Variety, Leslie Felperin chastised bandmates...
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The Terror Inside: ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ and ‘Black Swan’ By Alissa Wilkinson
Baby girls get swaddled in pink, all sweetness and light, cooing little bundles of cotton candy. We sing them lullabies, play melodies on music boxes that cradle spinning ballerinas, nestle them...
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Eyes Wide Shut: ‘Some Call It Loving’ and ‘Sleeping Beauty’ By Adam Nayman
Two roads diverged in a (Holly)wood: after the scandalous release of Lolita in 1962, Stanley Kubrick and his producer, James B. Harris, each set out to make a Cold War thriller based on a best-selling...
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Embracing the Unknown: ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’ By Piers Marchant
The most important parts of a film are the mysterious parts – beyond the reach of reason and language.—Stanley KubrickComing-of-age films generally chronicle the moment where a sexual and emotional...
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One Man, One Bullet: The Politics of Lindsay Anderson by Judy Berman
Mick Travis sits alone in his study, his back against a wall plastered with war photos, shooting a dart gun at images hung up on the opposite wall: a woman’s naked body pasted atop a line of police in...
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“Sing It the Way You Feel It”: Forgiveness and Faith in ‘Tender Mercies’ by...
“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”— Epistle to the Hebrews///Tender Mercies looks like nothing on paper. The script by Horton Foote is spare and direct,...
View ArticleThe Bittersweet Gags of Pierre Étaix by Kevin Tran
Throughout his heyday in the ‘60s, French filmmaker, gag-writer, and clown Pierre Étaix added to a tradition of meticulous, melancholic screen comedy that began with silent masters like Buster Keaton...
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No Exit to ‘Brooklyn’ by Ryan Wu
In the opening scene of Westminster, Trinh, a Vietnamese shopgirl, tells her boss that she’s moving to California to work at a nail salon. She explains that her prospects in Vietnam are bleak, and that...
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The Amazing Adventures of Mel Gibson, Action Director By Noel Murray
When Mel Gibson’s Braveheart won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director in 1996, longtime Oscar historians registered the victories as easily explained and largely insignificant. They were...
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Truly Inconvenient Truths: ‘The Island President’ and “Issue Doc” Aesthetics...
We like to say that documentaries can change the world. But the manner in which they change it matters. Ten years ago, when Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth sounded the alarm bells on man-made...
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Too Big a Fail: Cannes Insta-Flops and the Festival Economy by Mike D’Angelo
Cannes Film Festival, 2014. Among the films competing for the Palme d’Or is The Search, Michel Hazanavicius’ highly anticipated followup to The Artist, which had won the Best Picture Oscar three years...
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Fire from Heaven: The Making and Unmaking of Michael Cimino’s ‘The Sicilian’...
In 1986, David Begelman, head of Gladden Entertainment, and producer Bruce McNall sat down to watch a new cut of their latest production, The Sicilian. The anxiety and anticipation was through the...
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From ‘An Early Frost’ to ‘The Normal Heart’: The Shifting Sands of the AIDS...
“People are dying so fast that it’s like what I imagine being in a war would be like.”–volunteer nurse Hedy Straus in the 1987 documentary short Living With AIDSBy the time Ronald Reagan deigned to...
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Bohemian Requiem: How Agnès Varda’s ‘Lions Love (...and Lies)’ Presaged the...
In 1967, as young people from all over America were piling into Volkswagens and Greyhound buses bound for California, Agnès Varda relocated from Paris to Los Angeles. Her husband, the director Jacques...
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