Category: Film
Blow the Man Down Shows the Repressed New England Way to Snuff Out Patriarchy
With a title that plays on an old English “sea shanty” (a.k.a. “work song”), Blow the Man Down offers a controlled buildup to the ways [Read More…]
The Photograph: One Long Buildup to a Tag About Drake versus Kendrick Lamar
Barely eking by before the point when movie theaters would be dealt a death blow from COVID-19, The Photograph’s release on Valentine’s Day seemed to [Read More…]
The Assistant: A Micronomic Look at the Ripple Effect of Ignoring Abuse Pre-#MeToo
As Kitty Green’s debut feature (after releasing three documentaries, including Casting JonBenét), The Assistant feels like a petri dish of a sociological study on the [Read More…]
Dangerous Minds: The Rare Conundrum of A Movie Being Offensively Condescending & Also Good
From the moment LouAnne Johnson (Michelle Pfeiffer) walks into the classroom of Parkmont High, she is branded as “white bread” by the students she’s been [Read More…]
Love Won’t Save You: An American Werewolf in London
There is a common trope in every love story that begins with a seemingly insurmountable obstacle that actually is, in the end, insurmountable (though many [Read More…]
Madness Grows in Isolation–And Also In Company: Grey Gardens Through the Quarantine Lens
Little Edie, of course, was slightly more averse to staying confined, noting from the vantage point of her “youth,” “I suppose I won’t get out [Read More…]
Outbreak & “The President,” Or: Bill Clinton Was Way Too Peacenik to Blow Up A Town
As American governors already look to reopening states despite a paltry amount of time spent in confinement compared to Europe and China, one can, of [Read More…]
The Theory That We Are All In Some Version of David Fincher’s The Game Right Now
Of course, like any closed off, impossibly callous person, Nicholas van Orton (Michael Douglas) suffered an unforgettable trauma in his childhood: bearing witness to the [Read More…]
“You Want a Dorito?” How The Doom Generation Captured the American Ability to File Away Trauma
If anyone has ever mastered the art of disaffection and its immortalization in the pop culture oeuvre, it’s Generation X. Or what Gregg Araki billed [Read More…]
Chaos Is the New Cocaine & Other Revelations Seeking A Friend For the End of the World Taught Us
In a year that has rendered many apocalypse movies (in addition to zombie ones) freshly relevant, Lorene Scafaria’s directorial debut (after writing the script for [Read More…]
