It probably wasn’t literally New York City that killed Dylan Thomas. If anything, Dylan Thomas killed Dylan Thomas with his wild, inebriated lifestyle. But I suppose that isn’t nearly as romantic. So Andy Goddard’s Set Fire to the Stars, a…
Movie Review: “Hungry Hearts”
Childbirth is the most violent aspect of human existence. Consider: there are peaceful deaths but there are no peaceful births. So any film that concerns itself with the subject of childbirth and infancy has a built-in level of tension and…
The Film Canon: The Cheat (1915)
“In Paris this week, a movie theatre has become an art school. A film…[is] showing us what surprising innovations, what emotion, what natural and well-designed lightning can add to cinematic fiction,” declared Colette, one of France’s preeminent novelists of the…
The Most Feminist Moment in MAD MAX: FURY ROAD
The release of George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road could not have come at a better time. In the midst of a glut of disappointing, CGI-laden blockbusters came a vision of chrome and rust, a cynosure of dazzling practical effects…
The Film Canon: Pierrot le Fou (1965)
The films of Jean-Luc Godard, that great iconoclast of the French New Wave, have always been so mired in an esoteric miasma of philosophical/pop-cultural minutiae that attempting to decode them for their intended interior meanings is an exercise not only…
The Film Canon: Black God, White Devil (1964)
By the 1960s Brazilian cinema was in a crisis. For almost a decade Brazil had suffered under the tyranny of foreign (read: American) distributors and narrow-minded exhibitors that flooded the market with Hollywood epics and puerile chanchadas—low-budget musicals frequently featuring…
The Film Canon: The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
It is impossible to discuss Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) without examining the film’s two central figures: William Randolph Hearst, the American newspaper magnate that the film’s central megalomaniac was based on, and Welles himself, that sensational wunderkind whose talents…
