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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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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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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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When Dirty Harry Fought Pauline Kael by Keith Phipps
“Dirty” Harry Callahan fought many bad guys across five films between the years 1971 and 1988, from a serial killer named Scorpio to violent revolutionaries to a gang of seaside rapists. But one of his...
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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 Deepest Cut: The Hidden Emotion of Joel and Ethan Coen’s ‘The Man Who...
Over the course of their three-decade career, Joel and Ethan Coen have buried a man alive, fed a body into a woodchipper, and shot a grinning Brad Pitt in the face at point-blank range. The most...
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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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Split Diopter: Looking at Women’s Identities Through a Male and Female Lens...
It’s a common stereotype that men are known to be the more aggressive and competitive of the sexes, and that women are far coyer and subtler at the game. Studies have shown that women enjoy cooperation...
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Unready Player One: Why Movies and Video Games Don’t Mix by Daniel Carlson
There’s a concept in video game theory called “ludonarrative dissonance.” At its core, it’s about the interaction between a game’s themes (what it wants you to feel) and its mechanics (what it wants...
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The Deepest Cut: The Hidden Emotion of Joel and Ethan Coen’s ‘The Man Who...
Over the course of their three-decade career, Joel and Ethan Coen have buried a man alive, fed a body into a woodchipper, and shot a grinning Brad Pitt in the face at point-blank range. The most...
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The Two Werner Herzogs by John Redding & B. A. Hunt
Raffi Asdourian/Flickr (CC BY 2.0) | Pepe courtesy Matt Furie/mattfurie.com | Remix by Jason ReedWerner Herzog, that hypnotic German filmmaker who once tried to murder his leading man, who taunted...
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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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