In the same scheme in which Jacques Audiard’s Palm d’Or-winning migrant drama Dheepan metamorphizes into a hazy and violent stupor in it’s the final moments, his first foray into the western genre does something similar but this time in reverse.…
Perfect Blue 20 years later remains beautiful and haunting
How better to describe the films of the late Satoshi Kon than guiding spirits to our agitated subconscious. Although all his films can be called dream factories, this notion becomes quite literal in his last feature Paprika, a film that…
The Film Canon: Matinee (1993)
By 1960 close to 90% of American households owned a television set. This little bit of trivia plays a significant role in Joe Dante’s period comedy, set in Key West, Florida in October of 1962 when channels began broadcasting President…
The Film Canon: The Great Silence (1968)
At first glance there is little to distinguish between Jean-Louis Trintignant’s spaghetti western protagonist ‘Silence’ and Clint Eastwood’s ‘Man with No Name’. But over the course of Sergio Corbucci’s The Great Silence we see, not only a completely new figure…
The Film Canon: The General (1926)
Long before Buster Keaton’s train engineer sat on his beloved train’s pistons as they rotated up and down,the locomotive had already graced moving images—most famously in 1903’s fictional The Great Train Robbery and, even earlier, in the Lumière Brothers very…
5 Facts about Who Framed Roger Rabbit Making its Existence Baffling 30 Years Later
Who Framed Roger Rabbit was released 30 years ago today and despite the major innovations that have emerged since it remains an achievement without equal. Leaping over business, technological and creative hurdles that had been up until that point had…
The Yellow Birds Movie Review: An Inoffensive but Redundant Mess
The Yellow Birds begins with a tranquil image of flowing water, followed by a graceful camera pan over American troops marching cautiously over a war-ravaged Iraqi landscape. It’s an unusually peaceful snapshot of the Iraq war described from an almost…
