8 years ago
All posts by Adam W. Hofbauer
The Enduring Quality of Mary Elizabeth Winstead
Adam W. Hofbauer writes an appreciation of the work of Mary Elizabeth Winstead in advance of "10 Cloverfield Lane."
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How Roadshow Epics Predicted The Future of Cinema
"The Hateful Eight" and its 70mm roadshow engagement are just a revival of Old Hollywood's last attempt at popularity.
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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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On The Enduring Strength And Subversion of Lily Tomlin
“I see these stiff, inhibited women,” Lily Tomlin told Time Magazine in 1977. “Uptight, uncertain, thwarted.” She was describing the audiences of her live performances. She saw repression everywhere—this discomfort within women externalized in their very body ...
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We Were Once A Fairytale: On The Fantastic Four
The story of the Fantastic Four is essentially the story of Icarus. In the ancient version, a young man gifted with wings bound in wax ignores his father’s warnings about straying too close to the sun and plummets into the sea in a rain of melted wax. The Fant...
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Blu-ray Review: “Valerie and Her Week of Wonders”
Released just before the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia signaled the end of the country’s cinematic revolution, Jaromil Jires’s 1970 film Valerie and Her Week of Wonders has long been more known than seen. Residing in reputation somewhere between softcore ...
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“Elimination Game”
When Australian cult curio Turkey Shoot was released in 1982, the scope of the B movie wasn’t that far removed from marquee, studio pictures. And yet now here is that film remade in Jon Hewitt’s Elimination Game, landing somewhere between a low-budget Hunger G...
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A Tale of Two Batmans: “Forever” and “Begins”
Batman doesn’t exist. Objectively, Joel Schumacher’s neon camp-fests are no less defensible than the “what if he were a real guy?” approach director Christopher Nolan and co-screenwriter David Goyer introduced 10 years ago with Batman Begins. Batman has been a...
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The Movie-Star Fantasy of Chris Pratt
In Jurassic World, Chris Pratt does battle with the Indominus Rex, a fictional dinosaur bred by way of focus groups. But the Chris Pratt we see onscreen, that digital ghost of old photographs, is himself a creation of aggregate determinism. There is, somewhere...
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Homesick for the Past: On the Modern Film Critic
The unrepentant dandy of a critic Addison DeWitt (George Sanders) in All About Eve (1950) wields his influence like the magic of a Faustian Satan, manipulating stars and playwrights with nothing but the threat of a review. Yet he stands from society, distanced...
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