This evening, like every evening, you settle in to listen to a song from Cole Porter’s songbook. There is nothing like the sharp lash of…
First, on griots: these were the African Mande people’s historians, genealogists, poets, and court jesters. They were the official storytellers, and, as writers of their…
It’s mid-September, a broadcast TV network is on the brink of a merger, and an evening news segment could blow up these lucrative plans and…
The biography of an artist is an artist’s nemesis. It aims a howitzer at artists and the body of their work. In its illuminating, explicatory…
Traditionally, dramas dealing with characters moving on from relationships follow a three-part structure: the chronicling of the youthful highs of the first passionate relationship and…
It’s nothing less than a miracle that restorations of Margarida Cordeiro and António Reis’ criminally underseen Tras-os-Montes, Ana, and Rosa de Areia are making their…
“I HATE YOU ALL.” So begins Gangsterism, Isiah Medina’s latest film. Lest one doubt his sincerity, the poster is tagged with a statement of intent:…
In the 1960s, the genre that would become known in Japan as pinku eiga had just taken shape. This was a genre that dealt explicitly…
“So it returns. Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.” — James Joyce, Ulysses As the second…
Peter Fonda’s self-produced Idaho Transfer (1972) exists online as a decrepit VHS rip and a few equally shoddy digital re-uploads. I’ve heard tell of an…
By 1919, 24-year-old Richard Barthelmess was already a star. He’d just played the leading man, albeit in yellow-face, in D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms opposite…
In the spring of 1974, The Night Porter was released in Italian cinemas. Directed by Liliana Cavani, the film stars a young Charlotte Rampling as…
Like many of you, I first discovered the French New Wave as a budding cinephile in high school. It was my introduction to how the…
“He that diggeth a pit, shall fall into it.” — Ecclesiastes 10:8 They called him Von, the man in whom lived so many. Von Schnieditz, von…
Come a little closer and see — you need to inhale. No contemporary filmmaker understands California quite like Paul Thomas Anderson, who throughout his rightfully…
Ah, but first: an introduction. This is the first entry of Flashback, a new column hosted by In Review Online. Here, I play your very…
Socrates: The main question I want to ask is whether a lifetime spent scratching, itching and scratching, no end of scratching, is also a life…
It’s girthy, oversized, gold-encrusted, evocative of pain more than pleasure. No, I’m not talking about the massive enameled penis that makes a couple appearances throughout…
“This language of the unreal, this fictive language which delivers us to fiction, comes from silence and returns to silence.” – Maurice Blanchot, The Space…
It’s worth beginning where a piece like this usually doesn’t, because Munich is the kind of movie Steven Spielberg usually doesn’t make: in a film…
“Knights are now rooks! All bishops must leave the board! Pawns can now fly!” — not a surrealist pamphlet upon obvious improvements to the game…