Toxic masculinity had a year; scan the top three titles on this list and you’ll find three films about self-involved men belaboring the value of ‘their art’ — made by three self-involved men belaboring the value of their art. That may seem like a dispiriting regression, especially considering…
Proof of the lasting influence of Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 docudrama The Battle of Algiers can be glimpsed in two relatively recent films making a sizable dent in last year’s new-release landscape: Ana DuVernay’s Selma and Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper. In Selma — as was the case with the film that is arguably its spiritual forerunner, Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln — there…
There were times during this especially tumultuous year when it seemed as if the world at large was on the verge of collapsing. A whole commercial jetliner seemingly disappeared without a trace, leading some ostensibly serious news outlets to put forth honest-to-god inquires about the possibility of supernatural…
John Carpenter one-upped Michael Winner’s fear-mongering, un-ironically fascist 1974 hit Death Wish with 1976’s Assault on Precinct. But if that film implied critique of a police force sowing its own doom through tyrannical tactics, 1981’s Escape from New York paints a portrait of America’s repressed “others” seeking revenge against not only the police, but an entire governmental…
#9: Tiny Terrors: When Puppets (and Dolls) Attack Download episode here. Episode Description: November’s podcast comes late this year, for which we apologize. But hey, uh, hey. We wracked our brains trying to think of a good topic for Thanksgiving, something we were really thankful for. But eventually, we decided…