8 years ago
FullWidth (10 posts found)
“Z for Zachariah” And The Future of Humanity
Robert C. O’Brien’s 1974 novel Z for Zachariah tells a story of Paradise unregainable. In O’Brien’s novel, unlike Craig Zobel’s recent film adaptation, there is no Caleb character at all. Instead, Loomis is the man who killed his coworker. He has few good inte...
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Wes Craven: In Memoriam
It's clear from the outpouring of love after his death on August 30 that Wes Craven was not just a revered horror filmmaker, but also a pioneer in a kind of socially minded self-aware genre filmmaking that continues to flourish today. Before he made films, he ...
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The Divergent Career of Alex Ross Perry
Alex Ross Perry’s fourth film, the paranoid thriller Queen of Earth, marks a departure for the 31-year-old director, though in a sense he has been diverging from both his work and that of his peers from the start of his career. With its ambling photography and...
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Why Kristen Stewart Is Hollywood’s Most Sincere Starlet
Following Kristen Stewart’s turns in the Twilight series, among the most widely mocked film franchises of all time, public perception of the actress was less than kind. She usually seemed uncomfortable in the spotlight, gradually garnering a reputation for nev...
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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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The Cult of Tom Cruise
Tom Cruise imbues every performance with an exciting amount of personality and charisma. There is no one more fun to watch onscreen on a consistent basis. Yet the world remembers: He still jumped on Oprah’s couch.
Despite a prolific career, years of apologizi...
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“Jaws” At 40
Few directors have a filmography with as many highlights as Steven Spielberg, and few of his films transfer so cleanly from one decade to the next as his 1975 film Jaws. Spielberg’s first major feature at the helm, which is turning the corner on 40 years since...
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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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Mezzanine Essentials: “The Trial”
“It has been said that the logic of this story is the logic of a dream, or a nightmare,” says Orson Welles in the opening narration of his 1962 adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial. He seems to be talking specifically about a brief parable he’s just related f...
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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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