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We Used to Believe: Fantasies of Institutional Democracy in 1960s Hollywood...
During the last months of his life, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ordered that the mantelpiece in the White House’s state dining room be inscribed with John Adams’ prayer: “I pray Heaven to...
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Dr. Ryan: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Kremlin by Daniel...
Tom Clancy was not supposed to be famous. Born in 1947, he grew up middle class in Baltimore and got an English degree from Loyola, where he joined the Army ROTC but was barred from military service...
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Impossible to Please: How “Mission: Impossible” Made Fans Happy By Ignoring...
When a movie star stands on the red carpet at his latest premiere and tells an interviewer, “We made this one for the fans,” what does he mean? It sounds on the surface like a vaguely populist “Give...
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From Massacre to Massacre: The Heyday of Tobe Hooper, Horror’s Misunderstood...
Poltergeist is by no means the greatest horror movie ever made, but its first 45 minutes offers one of the best sustained stretches of scares, jokes, and subtle subversion in the history of the genre....
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The Doomed Romantics of ‘An American Werewolf In London’ and ‘The Fly’ by...
When John Landis’ An American Werewolf In London was released in 1981 and David Cronenberg’s The Fly followed five years later, what initially grabbed people’s attention were the Academy Award-winning...
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The Haunted Mansion: Blueprint For A More Intimate Thrill Ride by Steven...
Given that Haunted House stories descend from Gothic literature, it’s appropriate to begin with a great American artwork, Grant Wood’s 1930 masterpiece “American Gothic.” It’s the ubiquitous image of a...
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The Traumatic Horror of ‘Lovely Molly’ by Chris Evangelista
Molly stares into the camera, a woman undone, with bleary eyes close to the color of the red REC icon tucked away in the top right of the screen. She shivers and shakes, ready to make her confession....
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All Seasons of the Witch: Magical Women in Post-Counterculture Cinema by...
“Wildcats shall meet hyenas, / Goat-demons shall greet each other; / There too the lilith shall repose / And find herself a resting place,” reads Isaiah 34:14—the only biblical passage that mentions...
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Gregg Araki, Eternal Teenager by Charles Bramesco
“Life is lonely, boring and dumb.” —The Doom Generation“I feel like a gerbil smothered in Richard Gere’s butthole.” —also The Doom GenerationGregg Araki likes young people. He likes their asymmetrical...
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Filming the Unfilmable: On Six Versions of Emily Brontë's ‘Wuthering Heights’...
[Editor’s note: One of the six Wuthering Heights adaptations discussed in this essay is Andrea Arnold’s 2011 version, which is distributed by Oscilloscope Pictures. The opinion expressed below was...
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The Unlikely Autobiography of Prince’s ‘Under the Cherry Moon’ and ‘Graffiti...
Prince’s cinematic legacy effectively starts and stops with Purple Rain, the 1984 smash that cast the artist in a Star Is Born narrative. In the face of the overwhelming apocrypha surrounding the...
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A Playlist: What We’re Listening To This Week
When I find Myself in Times of Trouble…Many people would agree that 2016 has been one of the more frustrating and heartbreaking years in recent memory and, to be honest, it looks like 2017 might be a...
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A Playlist: What We’re Listening To This Week
It’s the most HoLiDaY time of the year…Welp, it’s finally here. The week during which everyone freaks out about getting each other the right gifts and impressing our loved ones with our commendable...
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Here I Raise My Ebenezer: Why “A Christmas Carol” Lasts Forever by Daniel...
“Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Jeshanah, and named it Ebenezer; for he said, ‘Thus far the Lord has helped us.’”— 1 Samuel 7:12“I don’t deserve to be so happy.”— “A Christmas...
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A Playlist: What We’re Listening To This Week
Well this is the New Year…Damn, son. It’s 2017! Congratulations to those of us who have made it this far. We pour one out for those who weren’t able to cross that finish line. Let’s play a game where...
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'All the King’s Men’: Your Guide and Non-Guide to the Post-Election United...
It’s shocking to realize we don’t have a good collection of cinematic equivalents to help us navigate the difficult post-election interregnum of 2016-2017. We have celebrations of democracy by the...
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A Playlist: What We’re Listening To This Week
It Is Very Cold And I Don’t Want to go Outside.Well, we knew it was coming, and it’s finally here: winter has arrived in New York City. It’s beautiful for about ten minutes. So enjoy it! Soon those...
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The Venomous Beauty of ‘By the Sea’ by Angelica Jade Bastién
[This month, Musings pays 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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A Playlist - What We’re Listening To 1/20/2017
Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here.Oscilloscope has never been shy about expressing our opinions concerning a certain repugnantly pumpkin-hued reality TV shill, who, by seducing and deluding the...
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‘The Counselor’: No Movie for Most Men (or Women) by Mike D’Angelo
[This month, Musings pays 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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