8 years ago
Longform (10 posts found)
The Unnerving Dream Logic of “Mulholland Dr.”
Early in Mulholland Dr., writer/director David Lynch makes a statement that clarifies his larger ambition, in a scene with two men who aren’t shown in any other portion of the film. If you have the subtitles on, or have especially good hearing, you can hear on...
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On The Bold Melodramas of Nicholas Ray
Nicholas Ray has been called many things in his ongoing lionization—“a poet of nightfall,” “a glorious failure,” and even “cinema itself.” His visual landscape was often one of brash Technicolor and densely layered Cinemascope, and he possessed a fascination w...
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The Cinema of Tumult and Discovery: On Judy Garland
“You know, I figure you have to know what you’re singing about before you can get the idea over to other people.” —Judy Garland, Babes in Arms (1939)
It was a year of tumult and of discovery. The Great Plains were ravaged by the Dust Bowl. Amelia Earhart comp...
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“Re-Animator” At 30
In his book Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, Jonathan Glover discusses what he calls "the cold joke”—wringing humor out of a lack of respect for human life—as a method people often use to distance themselves from atrocities they partake in, ...
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The Kingdom of the Sick on Film in 2015
If we ask the movies of 2015 to tell us what a person dealing with mental health issues looks like, who looks back at us? It could be Sarah Silverman’s character in I Smile Back, a suburban housewife afflicted with addiction and possible manic depression. Or i...
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Realerotik: A Brief History of Live Sex in Cinema
In 1964, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart made history by using the most plain-and-simple phrasing in his vocabulary to express his definition of hardcore pornography, declaring, “I know it when I see it.” In the eleventh episode of the third season of the...
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Show Your Work: On “Experimenter”
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” - Søren Kierkegaard
Undoubtedly, Kierkegaard had loftier goals in mind when he penned this observation, but it does neatly underscore a problem inherent to the biographical film. That whi...
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Adult Beginners: “Citizen Kane”
Even those casually interested in movies have bumped into Citizen Kane, probably on The Simpsons, or basically anywhere else in pop culture. Everyone knows Rosebud. I certainly knew Rosebud.
I also knew that the film had something to do with magnate William R...
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Introducing Adult Beginners
Here's the most embarrassing sentence I’ve ever had to write in my ten-year career as a film critic: until last week, I’d never seen Citizen Kane.
Determine for yourself how lame my excuse is: New Yorkers can almost always count on getting to see great new pr...
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On The Vexing Moral Murkiness of “Sicario”
Denis Villeneuve doesn’t make movies about human beings. After watching his last three works, Prisoners, Enemy, and Sicario, it’s clear that the inhabitants of his worlds are merely representations. This doesn’t seem intentional as much as it is incidental. Hi...
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