Skip to content

Tag: film

Columns

Framed Narrative
March 06, 2017
It is hard these days for even Israel’s most diehard supporters to pretend that something has not gone seriously wrong. A case in point: the sentencing last month of Elor Azaria, a twenty-year-old Israeli army medic caught on video putting a bullet in the head of a wounded ...

The Horror of North America
February 24, 2017
Jordan Peele’s Get Out, which premieres nationwide this Friday, is one of the few black horror films not about Africa to feature both possessed black people and the deep wilderness. This cinematic tradition can be traced back to the early twentieth century. In 1940’s ...

Red and Blue Highways
February 24, 2017
While La La Land is celebrated by the Academy Awards, there's a different America portrayed in American Honey. It was nominated for zero Oscars, but nonetheless remains 2016’s most interesting film. British filmmaker Andrea Arnold’s unusual story follows a young and profane ...

The Defiant I Am Not Your Negro
February 10, 2017
The film’s promotional poster notably features just Baldwin’s eyes and the title, and all through the film are magnetic images of black people staring, looking off, caught in their own subjectivity. The effect of these eyes turned back on the viewer is breathtaking. What ...

Make American Dystopias Great Again
January 27, 2017
It was a bright cold day in January, and the blogosphere was awash in the world of 1984. After senior Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway took to the airwaves to declare that her White House colleagues operated in a world of “alternative facts” it only seemed logical—and ...

Letter from Louisiana
November 01, 2016
Even as Donald Trump’s campaign has zero chance of winning California or his own state of New York—and despite being spectacularly, unprecedentedly unfit for the office of the presidency—Trump will easily win the eight electoral votes of Louisiana. What could possibly ...

Barren and Dangerous
October 24, 2016
In the thriller du jour The Girl on the Train, a kind of Rashômon for the bridge-and-tunnel crowd, three female perspectives compete for our attention and sympathy. At its core, Rachel (Emily Blunt) enacts her onscreen alcoholism via smudged eye makeup and artfully blurred ...

The Ho-Hum Squad
August 09, 2016
Some time in April 2015, Jared Leto sent someone to throw a dead pig on a table during the rehearsals for Suicide Squad. Those who were present at the time recount their shock and fear beholding the scene, their worry that they might be working with someone who was genuinely ...

The Joys of Consumption
July 03, 2015
In the 1970s, when the New Deal consensus began to erode, something unexpected started to play a role in popular culture. It was the decade after the industry-approved release of The Pawnbroker (1964), the first Hollywood film to show women’s bare breasts, and all the old ...

Spoof Vs. Spy
June 12, 2015
Summer 2015’s first big blockbuster comedy, Spy, may traffic in elaborate onscreen subterfuge, but it’s little more than the latest variation on a baby-simple, well-worn Hollywood formula.The movie’s admittedly energetic and amusing aim is to lampoon and critique the ...