7 years ago
Shelf Life 10
Shelf Life: ‘School of Rock’
School of Rock is a film that sounds, on paper, like a wafer-thin lark that fits snugly within the condescending subgenre of inspiring teacher films. However, depicted through Richard Linklater’s humanistic treatment of youth the film is something that's equal...
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Shelf Life: Forbidden Planet
Contrary to the largely political bent of the 1950s boon of science-fiction films, Fred M. Wilcox’s 1956 Forbidden Planet exists on largely psychological planes, played out in tense interpersonal relations that frequently hinge on Freudian overtones. Its deep-...
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Shelf Life: The Films of Kenneth Anger, Vol. 1
Shelf Life is a weekly feature that selects a film currently on DVD/Blu-Ray for review.
Confrontational in their subject matter and surrealistic in their composition and movement, Kenneth Anger’s films nevertheless provide an accessibly invigorating entry p...
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Shelf Life: Steamboat Round the Bend
Shelf Life is a weekly feature that selects a film currently on DVD/Blu-Ray for review.
"Time: The early 90’s
Place: The Mississippi River"
These two lines, laid matter-of-factly over a picturesque shot of a steamboat lazily rolling down the Mississippi...
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Shelf Life: The Girl Can’t Help It
Shelf Life is a weekly feature that selects a film currently on DVD/Blu-Ray for review.
The carefully ordered chaos of Frank Tashlin’s work has rarely been so concisely summarized than in the introduction to his 1956 feature The Girl Can’t Help It. Like the...
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Shelf Life: A Matter of Life and Death
Shelf Life is a weekly feature that selects a film currently on DVD/Blu-Ray for review.
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s run of films in the 1940s marks one of the all-time great cinematic hot-streaks. Joining forces on a set of propaganda films that...
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Shelf Life: Adventureland
Shelf Life is a weekly feature that selects a film currently on DVD/Blu-Ray for review.
Of all the R-rated but sentimental comedies to come out of Judd Apatow’s immense talent pool, Greg Mottola’s 2009 Adventureland may be the least raunchy but also the mos...
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Shelf Life: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
Shelf Life is a weekly feature that selects a film currently on DVD/Blu-Ray for review.
It wouldn’t be a Terry Gilliam film if something didn’t go catastrophically wrong, but 2009's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus stands out even among the tales of merc...
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Shelf Life: Man of the West
Anthony Mann’s Man of the West depicts the West as a prison from which there is no escape, where those who flee its cesspool of violence and anarchy get pulled back by some invisible force in due time. Mann’s style, at once cheaply utilitarian and psychologica...
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Shelf Life: Trash
Shelf Life is a weekly feature that selects a film currently on DVD/Blu-Ray for review.
Paul Morrissey’s Trash begins with a failed blowjob and ends with the offer of another. In-between, its use of verité camera techniques, harshly recorded direct sound (a...
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