8 years ago
Essential Reading (10 posts found)
Quintessential material
The Best Film Writing of 2014
As the year 2014 comes to a close, it offers time to reflect on the past twelve months in popular culture. Whether it was big moments in our nation such as Ferguson, the Ebola outbreak, or a cyber attack, we had plenty of trouble this year. We also lost some f...
Read more →
The Prestige Freak Show: Eddie Redmayne’s Metamorphosis in “The Theory of Everything”
It’s the year of “Oscar’s metamorphosis,” Jenelle Riley beamed in the header of a recent Variety survey of the lead performances anchoring the season’s graduating class of prestige pictures. Reese Witherspoon, she noted, shed her sunshiny demeanour to play a r...
Read more →
High and Know: On Stoned-Logic and the Expansion of the Stoner Film
In “Film Genre and the Genre Film,” Thomas Schatz lays down a few organizing principles that make up a film genre. Basically, there’s a system of conventions that over time eventually codify into “rules” that clearly identify a genre—think a Western with its r...
Read more →
The Emptiness of Days to Come: On Gender Stereotypes and Sex in “White Bird in a Blizzard”
When it comes to exploring themes on sexuality in film, few contemporary auteurs have been more radical, and more divisive, than Gregg Araki. A pivotal figure in the New Queer Cinema movement during the early 1990s, and highly considered to be the "bad boy" of...
Read more →
“Force Majeure” Director Ruben Östlund Examines the Perils of Groupthink: A Closer Look at the Swedish Director’s Filmography
Among the over 80 countries that have submitted films for the Oscars this year, Sweden's entry comes from a director unfamiliar to most North American cinephiles. Sweden has decided to submit Ruben Östlund's Force Majeure, but the film isn't Östlund's first to...
Read more →
The Man In a Room: Alex Ross Perry
Alex Ross Perry and I are at the tail end of a long discussion about his career when I finally ask him why his movies are so obsessed with loneliness. And then we talked about Paul Schrader.
Perry, 30, is speaking to me on the eve of the release of his thir...
Read more →
Days of Future Past: Looking Back at Shane Carruth’s “Primer” After 10 Years
When Primer was released in 2004, Shane Carruth—the film’s writer, director, producer, composer, editor, and one of its two main actors—was barely past 30, and he’d spent a couple of years assembling the film on his laptop for a final production cost of about ...
Read more →
“They Live” and Apocalyptic Tech Noir
Editor's note: Today we're proud to present readers with an exclusive passage from Peter Labuza's upcoming book Approaching the End: Imagining Apocalypse in American Film. Be sure to pick up the book up when it comes out next week, October 14, from The Critica...
Read more →
The Liberating, Evil Feminism of Gone Girl
Warning: Major spoilers for “Gone Girl” ahead.
In the opening moments of David Fincher’s domestic-union-gone-bad thriller Gone Girl, Nick Dunne (a seemingly vulnerable and sympathetic Ben Affleck) voices a desire to “crack a skull open.” The skull in questi...
Read more →
Overview: David Fincher
In our Overview series, Movie Mezzanine staffers go through the work of a director, one film at a time.
Even now, 10 features into his career, David Fincher’s status in the cinematic firmament is still very much up in the air, with each new film of his offer...
Read more →
