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Drama · Experimental & Underground · Exploitation & Erotica · Nazism · Splatter & Gore · War
Forgotten and derided Nazisploitation movies expose the lost power of trash cinema and put today’s neutered McMovies to shame. * * * Of all the overused movie clichés, the inescapable[…]
Conspiracies · Drama · SF & Fantasy
Knowledge is no longer public – it is in the hands of private companies, access conditional, sharing selective. And like everything that is privatized, what belongs to everyone does not[…]
Costume Drama · Drama · Essays · Mystery · Psychology · Thrillers & Action
Like the subtle differences of someone else’s cleaning efforts, our past is inescapable. A seemingly small choice can have myriad consequences, and this is what Kubrick is on about in[…]
Directors · Satire · Scandinavian Cinema
Our prevailing moviemaking ethos calls for emotion to be tempered through a kind of ebb and flow structure, for an emotion to be slowly built toward and quickly moved away[…]
Counterculture · Profiles · Writers & Critics
Judging from the total lack of information on screenwriter Adrien Joyce (Carole Eastman), Academy Award nominee for her original story and screenplay of Five Easy Pieces, I could have concluded[…]
Artists · Sex & Relationships · TV & Streaming · TV series
“Even without him, it’s still about him.” * * * Filmmaker Caveh Zahedi calls his series The Show About the Show (2015 – 2025) radically honest. Arguably, he pays the[…]
Drama · Essays · SF & Fantasy
Perhaps this is a fantasy. Perhaps this is the father as imagined, not as experienced. Perhaps this is what the students receive, and what the son never did. And so,[…]
Biopic · Historical & Epic · Romance · Shakespeare
Whereas Hamnet tugs at a few well-worn heartstrings to make us weep, Shakespeare in Love opens out onto a whole new world, stretching our imaginations to other times and places.[…]
Cinematographers · Erotica · Photographers
Cinematographers usually frame influence through cinema and painting – Vittorio Storaro citing Caravaggio, Roger Deakins invoking Johannes Vermeer, Conrad Hall recreating Edward Hopper’s lonesome framing – yet many of the compositional systems they use today were first stabilized[…]
Artificial Intelligence (AI) · Dystopia · SF & Fantasy
Fiery the angels fell; deep thunder rolled around their shores; burning with the fires of Orc. – Roy Batty, paraphrasing William Blake * * * Los Angeles, November, 2019 Dark[…]
When everything is shown, little is felt. * * * Cinema has always been described through movement – of images, of time, of bodies across space. Yet what if its[…]
Comedy · Drama · Family · French Cinema
As a film within the evolving Klapisch oeuvre, what La Venue de l’Avenir (2025) looks forward toward remains, of course, to be seen. As a capstone at this point in[…]
Hollywood · Music & Musicals · Pre-Code
An essay excerpted from the new edition of Persistence of Vision: A Collection of Film Criticism, edited by Joseph McBride, 2026. Originally published in 1968 by the Wisconsin Film Society[…]
Comedy · Military and Paramilitary · Nazism · Satire · War
Chaplin is not merely parodying how a dictator sounds. He is anatomizing how fascism recruits, extracts, degrades, appropriates, scapegoats, and lies. * * * Charlie Chaplin’s opening Hynkel speech in[…]
Counterculture · Directors · Exploitation & Erotica · Fairy Tale · Indies · Sex & Relationships
Even in the age of reevaluation, Borowczyk remains a problem critics would rather sidestep than solve. His films don’t fit the revival mold. They can’t be easily slotted into “elevated”[…]
Class System · Crime · Drama · French Cinema
What remains is a fierce critique leveled against money: the “father-master,” the heart of every exchange in free-market society, and the origin of the degradation of being first into having[…]
Drama · Politics · Thrillers & Action · War
The war didn’t end. It was put on hold. The system never slept – men like Gonzalez kept watch, women like Walker stared at screens, bureaucrats like that man filled[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Screwball Comedy
In a contemporary landscape populated by often-faltering comedies – films that try desperately to be clever only to end up feeling heavy – this 1942 picture recalls an elementary truth:[…]
Capitalism · Class System · Comedy · Drama
Released at a time when conservative hegemony was coming to an end, Planes, Trains and Automobiles can be contextualised as an example of a cinematic expression of an ideological conjuncture,[…]
Activist & Political · Essays · Franchises & Series · Politics · Superheroes
I only dimly perceived that one day Trump would threaten without provocation war against Denmark, so we could conquer Greenland, and who would willingly abet genocide in Gaza. I could[…]
Conspiracies · Essays · Superheroes
The opening shot of Bruce Wayne arriving at Max Schreck’s elite ball in Batman Returns, featuring a guest in a menorah headpiece. The shot is framed so Bruce collides head-on[…]
Brazilian Cinema · Horror · Labor
The horror in Hard Work is not that a monster exists; it is that the monster is structural. It resides in architecture, in managerial relations, in aspirational rhetoric, in the[…]
Activist & Political · Class System · Directors · Italian Cinema
Even after the radical shift in register with his collaboration with Massimo Fagioli, everything still holds up: the essence of historical struggle remains the true core of Bellocchio’s cinema, whether[…]
Mystery · Sex & Relationships · Thrillers & Action
In both films, the protagonist’s disorientation becomes a tool for the audience: we are not merely watching two men hunted by secret forces but two men whose consciousnesses have become[…]
