8 years ago
Features (10 posts found)
The Lure of the Pan
Within minutes of The Cobbler’s debut at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall, word started spreading that the movie could be an all-timer: a film so foul that it belongs in its own special category of crappy. By the time Thomas McCarthy’s latest ...
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On Asghar Farhadi’s “About Elly”
Editor's note: Today we're proud to present readers with an exclusive passage from Tina Hassannia's upcoming book. Be sure to pick up the book up when it comes out from The Critical Press.
About Elly (Darbareye Elly), one of Farhadi’s true masterpieces, was...
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Spotlight on Fandor: “Instrument”
If Fugazi were the defining post-hardcore band, collecting the shards of numerous dead-end underground sub-movements back into a unified contradiction of melody and abrasion, then Jem Cohen’s Instrument is the defining post-hardcore film. Visible film strips a...
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Mezzanine Essentials: “Peeping Tom”
The story of how Peeping Tom effectively killed Michael Powell’s career in the U.K. is well known, but perhaps Powell was actually trying to slay cinema itself? The film was trashed by British critics upon its release in 1960, resuscitated by the American New ...
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Going Glib: On Alex Gibney’s Fleet, Tactless Scientology Exposé
The Church of Scientology is famously thin-skinned as institutions go, but you can’t really fault them for wanting to take a collective hit out on Alex Gibney’s Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief. If the film isn’t quite the polemic its title su...
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Spotlight on Fandor: “Stroszek”
I wanted to pick a funny film for this week’s post-April Fool’s Fandor spotlight, and I don’t know what it says about me that I immediately gravitated to Werner Herzog’s demented, bleak Stroszek. Though set in the then-present 1970s, the film would make an eas...
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The Gospel According to Cinema, Part 2: The Rise of Christian Film
Having proven themselves adept at selling Christian films to a paying audience, film producers like the Christian-based Pure Flix now find themselves at a crossroads. While the films have done well financially, they’re hardly mainstream. It’s not that Christia...
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A Spring & Summer Preview of The Critical Press
Today, we are proud to present Movie Mezzanine readers with a preview of what The Critical Press will be putting out in the spring and summer. Over the next few months, we will be selectively publishing passages from the books listed below. For now, enjoy the ...
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The Gospel According to Cinema, Part 1: The Rise of Christian Film
Last weekend, the Pure Flix-produced, inspirational drama Do You Believe? opened in theaters, and if you’re a regular moviegoer, chances are you didn’t see it. You might not have even heard of it. As its title suggests, Do You Believe? is about religion. More ...
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Spotlight on Fandor: “Meek’s Cutoff”
Westerns as diverse as High Plains Drifter and Johnny Guitar have portrayed the Old West as a great conflagration—a hell of scorched land and inhospitable, forgotten souls. Meek’s Cutoff, on the other hand, presents the West as purgatory—a bleached-out void wh...
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