A decade ago, a baffling headline made waves throughout social media and film forums: director Steven Soderbergh, relatively young, announced his retirement. It was difficult…
Los Alamos, New Mexico: Apache country. Just a half-hour drive from Santa Fe, the land of Los Alamos was sparse but beautiful. The land hosts…
In his New York Times review of the English translation (by William Weaver) of The Name of the Rose, Franco Ferrucci described Umberto Eco’s idea…
Lest the sun not rise again, Indiana Jones must return, he must gallivant to another side of the globe and retrieve the magical MacGuffin, and…
When Carl Sagan wrote about the Pale Blue Dot photograph, in which a satellite photo frames Earth as a blue speck of dust in space…
Pietro Marcello’s background in documentary work aided his first fiction debut, Martin Eden, as his penchant for handheld Super 16mm film gave a “being there”…
Ever since he moved to Rome, Abel Ferrara has focused much of his directorial output on the land of his family: Pasolini, Piazza Vittorio, Tommaso,…
It’s easy to see into the future. All one has to do is see the present and ask what would happen if we accepted the…
One of the many privileges of attending a film festival lies in watching the programs of shorts, cleverly curated such that one does not take…
Though Travis Wilkerson is an American filmmaker, his subjects, methods, and tone mirror what’s called Third Cinema — politically charged movies made outside the Hollywood…
There is no winning in Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) — not really. You can reach the end of a campaign or defeat something very nasty,…
Most of La Bonga takes place in darkness; just flashlights serve as key lights while voices (voiceovers? diegetic?) guide the shaky frame to an invisible…
The ghosts of the Vietnam War now outrank the survivors. After fifty years, it may as well be ancient history, with Ken Burns’ recent documentary,…
As any “junkie” can tell you, at a certain point, Oxycontin stopped being Oxycontin, and many Oxy users in the United States turned to heroin.…
Laugh now, but back in the 1950s, the CIA would pay top dollar for any hint of mind control technology, leading to the mass hiring…
In 1843, Karl Marx decided he would move away from Cologne to a land that would be more open to his ideas, more open in every…
Tucked into the lap of the tributaries of the Euphrates River, the city of Babylon once towered. Hammurabi, who conquered the entirety of Southern Mesopotamia,…
“Sr.” is complex and surprising in its construction, its focus at the crossroads of love and folly and the man who constantly put them on…
In recent years, Copenhagen’s Rigshospitalet was the site of most of the major Danish royalty’s births. Last year, it was ranked the 15th best hospital…
Weird is a lovably cartoonish take on the musical biopic, but there’s simply too much dead air between its gags to keep things as funny…