Every time I come back to Pinkerton, I feel the same hesitancy just before hitting play. Have I finally outgrown this record? Will the second-hand embarrassment of hearing Rivers Cuomo croon “smell you on my hand for days / can’t wash your scent away”…
Even before his international recognition as one of Germany’s leading filmmakers, Christian Petzold was already cultivating and mastering his thematic and stylistic preoccupations. Bearing his serial enthusiasm for genre alongside his signature undercurrents of fleeting but doomed passion, Cuba Libre, his made-for-television second feature,…
The summer of 1996 saw the release of three huge blockbusters that would in one way or another influence the next 20 odd years of Hollywood filmmaking. Twister revived the moribund eco-disaster picture, while Mission: Impossible gave global superstar Tom Cruise his very own (ongoing) action franchise. The…
In their 2015 documentary, De Palma, Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow let iconoclastic writer/director Brian De Palma speak about each of his films, chronologically, from early student films to 2013’s Passion. A fascinating (if minor) document, De Palma serves one important function: it locates…
“I didn’t know you never wake up from some dreams.” says Officer 663 (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai), one of many lovelorn characters in Wong Kar-wai’s 1994 cult classic Chungking Express. Shot in less than a month on handheld cameras, it was meant to be something…
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…
The brilliance in the work of Joel and Ethan Coen comes from the brothers’ ability to find balance in the seemingly contradictory nature of life. The Coens love contrasts: those of plot and character and those having to do with the visual art of…
#99: The Craft Download episode here. Listen to episode here. Episode Description: This week, we kick off our annual Month of Horrors Extravaganza by taking on 1996’s teen thriller The Craft, directed by Andrew Fleming. Four high school girls get witchy and discover that…
Innocence and experience materialize in the poetry of William Blake as opposing forces; the former embodied within natural objects, passions and love, whereas the latter, like any good romantic, is found in the blackened corruption spreading across the land, engendering the extreme squalor of…
The adage coined by Charlotte Whitton — that women must work twice as hard to be considered half as good as men — was repeatedly validated as women began to make serious gains on men in 20th century art. Take the rap game: it…
