For Fear of Retribution: All Through the Night
The Film’s Strength, the Show’s Weakness: Willow’s Childlike Sense of Wonder
They Shoot Hamsters, Don’t They
For Fear of Retribution: All Through the Night
|John Costello| Although All Through the Night is primarily a comedy about small-time New York racketeers who become entangled in a spy ring working for the Nazi regime, the slapstick characters take moral positions for community, empathy, and democracy. The movie gives insights...
The Film’s Strength, the Show’s Weakness: Willow’s Childlike Sense of Wonder
|Dan Howard| Adventure. Excitement. A jedi may crave not these things, but a former Ewok-turned-sorcerer just might. After Return of the Jedi delivered a triumphant finale to the Star Wars trilogy in 1983, George Lucas was not only focusing on a prequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark...
They Shoot Hamsters, Don’t They
|MH Rowe| If you’re going to do something really stupid, it’s not a bad idea to be beautiful. Maybe that’s how Val Kilmer ended up in Top Secret! (1984), which is both his film debut and a spoof of spy stories, resistance thrillers, and, for some reason, Elvis Presley. Top Secret!...
Ah, Yes, Another 80s/90s “Children’s Movie” or FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WHY WOULD OUR PARENTS SHOW US THIS
|Allison Vincent| I want to start by making it clear that I love all of these movies. They are core memories for me as a kid partly because they scared the hell out of me, but mostly because, despite losing nights of sleep, they enthralled me. They are full of rich storylines, characters, themes, and...
The Great Escape as Masculine Melodrama
|Dylan Hawthorn| The concept of melodrama has a bad reputation. If I described my sister’s behavior during a conflict as melodramatic, I am suggesting that her reaction is over-the-top and should be dismissed. Furthermore, there’s a reason my brain jumped to citing a...
The Great Ecstasy of Digging a Hole
|Malcolm Cooke| For the past few months or so my father has been digging a very large hole in his backyard. It started with some error in the installation of a rain garden I always struggle to comprehend the details of. The contractor said a previous hole that was filled needed to...
Requiem for a Senior Vice President
|Nate Logsdon| Donald Trump sees himself in The Fountainhead. “It relates to business and beauty and life and inner emotions,”1 he explained in 2016, avowing an interest in the writings of Ayn Rand widely shared among conservatives though dubious in his own case considering his notorious...
What A Shame
|Patrick Clifford| Requiem for a Heavyweight is a tightly scripted, expertly acted film that centers around the career-ending knockout of a boxer. It is worth noting that a requiem is defined as a service or composition in honor of the dead. The film opens by putting us in...
Live From New York: How Rod Serling’s Patterns Elevated TV Drama
|J.R. Jones| This review contains spoilers. In our modern media landscape, where TV and the movies are slowly dissolving into a giant video stream, we might not recall that 70 years ago these two media were starkly distinguished. Movies were prestigious, a serious art form, and television was...
The Cost of Integrity: Rod Serling Vs. The Corporations
|Wil McMillen| Portrait of a nervous man in the midst of a crisis. He’s sitting with his wife, having dinner at a Howard Johnson’s. The air is heavy with what he needs to tell her. Earlier that day he quit his job at the local radio station after being tasked with writing a show based on a new...
Searching for Tucci: An Appreciation of One of Hollywood’s Most Reliable Supporting Players
|Andrew Neill| I’m in a hotel room in Appleton, Wisconsin, and turn on the TV. It’s on CNN, but instead of some talking head feeding the news cycle, there’s a man I recognize but haven’t seen in a long time. He’s sauntering down a narrow street between ancient, eroding buildings and...
Captain Kirby: Jack Kirby’s Influence on Captain America: The First Avenger and the Entire MCU
|Ben Jarman| Up until his death, Stan Lee showed up in a cameo role for every movie that’s part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Even general audiences loved finding him pop up as a postman or security guard. Appearances like this quickly made Stan Lee a household...
Self-Efface Yourself! The Fragmented Identities in Ōshima’s The Ceremony
|Alex Kies| Lots of interesting things happen at weddings and funerals. It’s a shame to miss any of it. - Ritsuko Although he is a key figure of Japanese New Wave, and his final films were consciously West-facing, Ōshima Nagisa never quite took off in the West like his friend Kurosawa Akira...
Young Boy, Old Soul
|Terry Serres| The 1969 film Boy (Shonen) by Nagisa Ōshima is something of a minor masterpiece, a work that is undeniably moving but still hard to crack, as inscrutable as its young protagonist’s impassive gaze. The boy in question is Toshio Omura, played by Tetsuo Abe...
Toward the Freedom of America: Casablanca
|John Costello| Two-thirds of the way through Casablanca (1942), the action pauses in Rick's Café Américain to dwell on three minor characters seated at one of the tables. Instead of another scene involving a pickpocket or a musical number advancing the story, the camera lingers on an elderly couple, the Leuchtags. Carl, a waiter...
Casablanca in Casablanca
|MH Rowe| Things are not quite as you remember in Casablanca. Consider before anything else the film’s hellish yet also somewhat corny setting. Here we have the city of Casablanca on the coast of Morrocco only days before Pearl Harbor, December 1941. None of the film’s characters know the fateful Japanese
Putting the ‘Motion’ in ‘Motion Picture’: Key GIFs from Lawrence Dane’s Heavenly Bodies
|Chris Polley| When I found out that no one had claimed to write something for the Trylon’s upcoming screening of 1984 Canuxploitation dance-ercise flick Heavenly Bodies, I felt like Charlie getting the golden ticket to the chocolate factory. What did I do to deserve this? I’d thank...
Watching the The Rocketeer with My Inner Child in Superhero Interzone 1991
|Chris Ryba-Tures| As I grimly plod into my forties, movie nostalgia has…not so much become a heady escapist drug, so much as an increasingly out-of-body point of fascination. Obviously, because childhood is generally just so easy to wax nostalgic about, but moreover because the...
The Rocketeer
|Bob Aulert| Up in the air, Junior Birdman The Rocketeer (1991) blends nostalgia, adventure, romance, and patriotism into a classic superhero narrative. Set in the golden age of aviation during the late 1930s, it’s an adaptation of Dave Stevens's comic book series of the same name...
The Ecstatic Truth of Werner Herzog’s Short Documentaries
|Malcolm Cooke| Werner Herzog has one thing to say to the proponents of Cinéma Vérité: “‘Happy New Year, losers.’”1 Herzog has always had beef with the idea of documentary as from the perspective of a fly on the wall, a genre of detached and objective reporting of facts. “That...
Werner Herzog, Dziga Vertov, and the Search for Truth
|Dan McCabe| In 1999, acclaimed German filmmaker Werner Herzog came to the Walker Art Center for an on-stage interview with the late film critic Roger Ebert. During the interview, Herzog made his “Minnesota Declaration”—a twelve-point denunciation of Cinema Verité, a style of documentary...
Broadsword Calling Danny Boy: Reflections on a Childhood Favorite
|Reid Lemker| What was the first “adult” movie you saw as a kid? For me, the first movie that comes to mind is Where Eagles Dare. I was probably ten or eleven when my dad first showed it to me, and it quickly became a favorite of ours to watch on...
A Clash of Kings: Eastwood and Burton in Where Eagles Dare
|Devin Bee| Where Eagles Dare is a film of clashes. The story sounds simple enough: during World War II, an American general is held captive by Nazis in a Bavarian castle. An elite squad of Allied soldiers—six British and one American—are tasked with infiltrating the castle and saving the...
Merrily We Go to Hell’s Dorothy Arzner, the Only Female Director in 1930s Hollywood
|Ed Dykhuizen| Female directors were commonplace, even at times dominant, in early film history. Alice Guy-Blaché directed more than 450 short films starting in 1896. Many scholars credit her with the first movie that had a narrative. In these earliest years, small companies...