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Oeuvre: Fellini: I Vitelloni
It was the 1950s and cinema was changing. The American studio system was struggling to satisfy an audience turning ever more to the accessibility of TV entertainment. Countries across the globe were...
View ArticleJakob’s Wife
Two movies are fighting for the attention of the audience in Jakob’s Wife, and both of those movies have a lot of potential that has gone sadly unexplored by co-writer/director Travis Stevens. The...
View ArticleRediscover: Getting Gertie’s Garter
“There’s always a mathematical solution to anything.” That driving principle comes not from a renowned scientist but from prolific director Allan Dwan, whose career grew with the very birth of cinema....
View ArticleMonday
One thing is for certain by the end of Monday (both the film and the weekday of the title, on which the denouement is set): the lovers at the center of Rob Hayes and director Argyris Papadimitropoulos’...
View ArticleBill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts
The 2018 exhibition Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor, organized at the Smithsonian American Art Museum by curator of folk and self-taught art Leslie Umberger, was the first major museum...
View ArticleCriminally Underrated: Air Doll
There’s a lot of creative mileage in the Pygmalion myth. As Ovid told it, it’s simple and straightforwardly misogynistic; the sculptor Pygmalion, disgusted with the state of womankind, carves a...
View ArticleBeast Beast
There is, no doubt, a right way for artists to approach any topic. Nothing can nor should be off limits for an earnest, educated artist to tackle tricky subject matter with insight and compassion. It’s...
View ArticleTogether Together
The responsibilities of surrogacy are complex but only extend so far. This person is providing a service – a precious and important and often life-changing one – for someone else (or, more often than...
View ArticleTrigger Point
Trigger Point is a difficult film to form an opinion about. Not because Trigger Point barters in any difficult or confrontational material, nor due a labyrinthine plot of twists that are difficult to...
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Oeuvre: Fellini: La Strada
Fellini’s La Strada is the first film in his thematic Loneliness Trilogy, along with Il Bidone and Nights of Cabiria. It was also the film that established him as a serious director destined for great...
View ArticleBloodthirsty
“Serious” horror filmmaking is a concept with a lot to answer for. It’s something of a scam, appropriating the language and techniques of conventional dramatic filmmaking to lend its lower-class genre...
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Revisit: Naked City
In the 2003 film, Los Angeles Plays itself, director Thom Andersen explored how the City of Angels is portrayed in movies. Using footage from other films, Andersen created a vision where the city of...
View ArticleTiny Tim: King for a Day
You’d think a figure who was documented by Andy Warhol, rubbed elbows with Bob Dylan and influenced David Bowie would be taken seriously as a pop music pioneer. Yet Herbert Butros Khaury, aka Tiny Tim,...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Ski Party
The high concept of the nearly unwatchable 1965 musical comedy Ski Party can be summed up as: What if Some Like It Hot, but with teenagers at a ski resort? The wise channel-surfer should immediately...
View ArticleIn the Earth
Venturing into the forest can serve as a refuge from the commotion of a chaotic society and its many ills, especially amid a pandemic that’s made modern living a bit more claustrophobic. After all,...
View ArticleFour Good Days
Four Good Days is anchored by two fine performances at the center of its story, which follows a mother’s relationship with a daughter caught in the throes of addiction. This mother-daughter dynamic has...
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Oeuvre: Fellini: Il Bidone
Nestled within the Fellini back catalogue, between such celebrated titles as I Vitelloni, La Strada and Nights of Cabiria in his meteoric mid-’50s rise to fame, is a Fellini pic unlike any other. A...
View ArticleAbout Endlessness
Does a film need to relate a coherent story? Does pacing matter? Should the audience know whether they are watching a comedy or a tragedy? About Endlessness, the latest film from Swedish director Roy...
View ArticlePercy Vs Goliath
Courtroom dramas based on true stories about plucky underdogs taking on huge corporations and winning have become a staple of previous awards seasons, Erin Brockovich being just one notable example....
View ArticleRevisit: Bad Lieutenant
The vision of policing presented in Bad Lieutenant, a mordant, searing account of a New York City cop in deep spiritual crisis, seemed fairly radical at the time of its 1992 release. Way beyond the...
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