Classifying Blue strictly as a piece of cinema seems like a rather odd distinction, considering Derek Jarman breaks the cardinal sin of the medium by removing any and all moving images from his final product. Instead, we’re given only one image — or, only…
Alain Resnais’s ingenuity as a filmmaker is on full display in his adaptation of one of the British theater’s most complex and rewarding works, Intimate Exchanges. A theatrical octet written between 1982 and 1983 by prolific playwright Alan Ayckbourn, the work is comprised of…
In 1987, Margaret Thatcher made her infamous assertion that “there is no such thing as society” in order to espouse her doctrine of methodological individualism. Well, if the specter of Thatcher looms large over Naked, then it seems only natural that most of its characters should…
OK, so things don’t really vanish anymore: even the most limited film release will (most likely, eventually) find its way onto some streaming service or into some DVD bargain bin assuming that those still exist by the time this sentence finishes. In other words, while the title of In Review…
A Perfect World‘s title is contradictory, born from a phrase that implies that life will never really amount to what we want it to — but abbreviated, so as to suggest that the central relationship in Clint Eastwood’s film is a utopian alternative to the…
Brazil in the early ’90s, seen in popular imaginaries of the West as a rich cultural oasis of bustling urbanity and golden, suntanned sexual expression, loses its luster when looked at through the lens of its imperial history. Riddled with almost 400 years of…
In an effort to reboot our music coverage, In Review Online has launched some monthly features devoted to reviewing new album releases. One such feature is Foreign Correspondent — a survey of new releases from the international music world. In this issue, we cover releases from Chilean pop sensation Mon Laferte; two…
Where Shin’ya Tsukamoto pulled Japan’s industrial guts out and gave them horrid new life, Sion Sono dove in to the same viscera and lit a cigarette. Ballardian ennui and Garrellian textured stillness, Sono bites his thumb at the idea of precious pretension as a…
There is a remarkable shot late in The Age of Innocence when the narrator (Joanne Woodward) describes a room in Newland Archer’s (Daniel Day-Lewis) New York City home as “the room in which most of the real things in his life had happened.” As the camera…
#5: The Tree of Death: Rooting Around in the Killer Tree Subgenre Download episode here. Episode Description: This month, Simon & Steve tackle a fundamentally ridiculous topic when they decide to go rooting around in the very small killer-tree subgenre. (Tree? Rooting? You see what I…