Give ‘Em the Old Razzle Dazzle: All That Jazz and the Strength of Self-Reflection

|Courtney Kowalke| The day after Perisphere assigned me All That Jazz (1979) for my next film essay, the web browser on my phone recommended I read the IndieWire article “‘All That Jazz’ Is a Favorite of Fincher, Kubrick, and Scorsese—Here’s Why.” I’m not a fan of whatever...

Fosse’s Reckoning: Wrestling With Demons, Death, Cinema, and Broadway

|Dan Howard| Bob Fosse. His name alone is engraved into the history of dance, Broadway, and cinema in works from Chicago to Cabaret. Even Michael Jackson saw him as one of his heroes. The reputation that bestowed Fosse as one of the greats was as well-known as how...

A Subtle Kind of Jackhammer: Moulin Rouge!, Pop Art, and the Cinema of Baz Luhrmann

| Dan McCabe | Baz Luhrmann isn’t your typical “great” filmmaker. His style hits audiences like a jackhammer. Moulin Rouge! (2001) is technically a period drama, but you could be forgiven for thinking the period was the 1990s and not the 1890s...
Give ‘Em the Old Razzle Dazzle: All That Jazz and the Strength of Self-Reflection

Give ‘Em the Old Razzle Dazzle: All That Jazz and the Strength of Self-Reflection

|Courtney Kowalke| The day after Perisphere assigned me All That Jazz (1979) for my next film essay, the web browser on my phone recommended I read the IndieWire article “‘All That Jazz’ Is a Favorite of Fincher, Kubrick, and Scorsese—Here’s Why.” I’m not a fan of whatever...
Fosse’s Reckoning: Wrestling With Demons, Death, Cinema, and Broadway

Fosse’s Reckoning: Wrestling With Demons, Death, Cinema, and Broadway

|Dan Howard| Bob Fosse. His name alone is engraved into the history of dance, Broadway, and cinema in works from Chicago to Cabaret. Even Michael Jackson saw him as one of his heroes. The reputation that bestowed Fosse as one of the greats was as well-known as how...
A Subtle Kind of Jackhammer: Moulin Rouge!, Pop Art, and the Cinema of Baz Luhrmann

A Subtle Kind of Jackhammer: Moulin Rouge!, Pop Art, and the Cinema of Baz Luhrmann

| Dan McCabe | Baz Luhrmann isn’t your typical “great” filmmaker. His style hits audiences like a jackhammer. Moulin Rouge! (2001) is technically a period drama, but you could be forgiven for thinking the period was the 1990s and not the 1890s...
Courtesan Glamour: Watching Moulin Rouge! in 7th grade

Courtesan Glamour: Watching Moulin Rouge! in 7th grade

|Olga Tchepikova-Treon| I saw the “Lady Marmalade” music video before I saw Moulin Rouge!. Performed by a hot quintet of pop-singing ladies (Missy Elliot, who I admired for smooth dance moves; Christina Aguilera, entering her exciting dirty grrrl phase; P!nk, a tomboy role model;...
Between Hardship and Liberation: Connecting Working Girls Across Time Through the Triple Feature

Between Hardship and Liberation: Connecting Working Girls Across Time Through the Triple Feature

|Jillian Nelson| During the summer of ‘92, right before her senior year of high school, my mother moved out of her parents’ home and into her great aunt’s basement which she rented for fifty dollars a month. Her senior year she paid for everything on her own: school supplies, sports equipment...
A Stanley Kubrick Christmas: Intense Paranoia and Masquerade Orgies

A Stanley Kubrick Christmas: Intense Paranoia and Masquerade Orgies

|Dan Howard| There's certainly something about the holiday season that strikes a chord with filmmakers. Whether it’s Todd Hayne’s Carol, Tim Burton’s Batman Returns, or Shane Black’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, any film using Christmas as the backdrop for a non-holiday story sets...
Aim the Drill at the Ground and Turn It On: Ben Affleck, Armageddon, and the Golden Age of the DVD Commentary

Aim the Drill at the Ground and Turn It On: Ben Affleck, Armageddon, and the Golden Age of the DVD Commentary

|Andy Strudevant| The depth of annoyance that a lot of movie people felt about this subject is a little harder to parse from a quarter-century later, because I think movie people are supposed to be a little bit more broad-minded and populist these days. But man, it’s worth remembering...
Lenny Bruce: Out of the Shit-House for Good

Lenny Bruce: Out of the Shit-House for Good

|J.R. Jones| There’s obscene, and there’s obscene. When standup comedian Lenny Bruce, worn down by years of prosecution for narcotics possession and obscene language in his nightclub act, died of a morphine overdose in August 1966, police gave news photographers a five...
“Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” Brings Weirdness to the Masses

“Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” Brings Weirdness to the Masses

|Ed Dykhuizen| For the first half of the 20th century, all movies were made for everyone. There was no rating system, so everything had to be OK for both kids and adults. And there weren’t that many options on a particular day. You might have a choice of a western or a comedy...
A Woman’s Place in Television, Ambition and Murder: Gus Van Sant’s To Die For

A Woman’s Place in Television, Ambition and Murder: Gus Van Sant’s To Die For

|Penny Folger| To Die For plays at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, January 10th through Sunday, January 12th. Visit trylon.org for tickets and more information. Gus Van Sant’s To Die For, released in 1995, showcases a bristlingly ambitious woman named Suzanne Stone, played by Nicole Kidman, who will stop at nothing...
Ghosts in Spain: The Complicated History of Amenábar’s Breakout Hit

Ghosts in Spain: The Complicated History of Amenábar’s Breakout Hit

|Malcolm Cooke| The Others plays at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, January 10th through Sunday, January 12th. Visit trylon.org for tickets and more information. Director Alejandro Amenábar wrote the music for his third film, The Others (2001), just like he had for all of his previous projects. He was admittedly still an...
Columns on Kidman: Revisiting To Die For 30 Years Later

Columns on Kidman: Revisiting To Die For 30 Years Later

|Ben Jarman & Carey Nadeau| To Die For plays at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, January 10th through Sunday, January 12th. Visit trylon.org for tickets and more information. The teens in this film are not realistic. That’s the only negative thing I thought about Gus Van Sant’s To Die For, but I...
Christopher Isherwood, Cabaret, and Adaptation of the Self

Christopher Isherwood, Cabaret, and Adaptation of the Self

|Allison Vincent| So, firstly, this is how I feel/sound when I talk about Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin, I Am a Camera, and Cabaret: ... I get weird, loud, and oddly academic, and there is a lot of red string. Here’s (in a nutshell) why:
High Sierra: The American Crime Film in Transition

High Sierra: The American Crime Film in Transition

|Ryan Sanderson| Rushing Towards Death was the title W.R. Burnett originally wanted for High Sierra, the book that became the movie that made Humphrey Bogart into a movie star (and, more circuitously, John Huston into a director). That first—I would argue more evocative—title came from...
The Architecture of Family: An Autumn Afternoon and The Royal Tenenbaums

The Architecture of Family: An Autumn Afternoon and The Royal Tenenbaums

|Andrew Neill| Let’s get a potentially uncool but nonetheless true thing about me out of the way right now: I am a huge fan of the American film director Wesley Wales Anderson. You probably know him as Wes Anderson. He’s one of my favorite directors—gotta be in the top three...
A Familiar and Familial Farewell: Ozu’s Final Film

A Familiar and Familial Farewell: Ozu’s Final Film

|Dan Howard| By the start of 1962, Yasujirō Ozu had already directed a staggering 53 feature films that spanned a 33-year journey. With classics like Tokyo Story (1953) and Floating Weeds (1959) to lesser-known gems like The Munekata Sisters (1950), the deeper you dive...
He Knows When You’re Awake: (Re)Visiting the History of Santas in Horror

He Knows When You’re Awake: (Re)Visiting the History of Santas in Horror

|Finn Odum| Eons ago (in 2019), when I was but a spritely, youthful child (20 and in college), I wrote about the 1984 controversial Claus classic Silent Night, Deadly Night. Back in the days of zinger conclusions and quippy comments on Santa Claus’s sanctity, I had dreams...
Women in the Eyes of Men – Ozu and Kore-eda

Women in the Eyes of Men – Ozu and Kore-eda

|Nicole Rojas-Oltmanns| Japan seems to have a magnetic pull for educated Millennials. The USA, it seems, is the antithesis of the orderly, tidy, traditional, technologically advanced, and ritualistic culture of Japan in the minds of many. Whenever anyone begins recounting...
How To Properly Identify the Ending of On Dangerous Ground

How To Properly Identify the Ending of On Dangerous Ground

|MH Rowe| On Dangerous Ground (1951) might appear at first to be one of the more unbearably melodramatic film noirs ever produced. Its ending, or really the ending of the ending—the film’s final scene—threatens especially to pull all that has preceded it down into the depths of pure...
Ozu’s Colorful Everyday: Equinox Flower (1958) and Late Autumn (1960)

Ozu’s Colorful Everyday: Equinox Flower (1958) and Late Autumn (1960)

|Steve Rybin| The Trylon’s “Ozu in Color” series presents four of Yasujirō Ozu’s color films made near the end of the director’s career (1958 to 1963). These films cover what is for Ozu familiar narrative ground: fathers and mothers give away daughters to marriage; generational conflicts pit...
Photographed Where It Happened

Photographed Where It Happened

|Nate Logsdon| “This is a true story. It was photographed where it happened.” In two sentences, the onscreen statement before the opening credits of Ida Lupino’s Never Fear—the first picture produced by her production company The Filmakers—distills the ethos of independent cinema...
New Ideas in Old Hollywood: Ida Lupino’s Outrage

New Ideas in Old Hollywood: Ida Lupino’s Outrage

|Doug Carmoody| Content Warning: Discussion of sexual assault on screen. Ida Lupino’s Outrage has a concept ready-made for modern independent film glory. A famous actress writing and directing a blunt, socially aware film about sexual assault has been a recipe for several of the buzzier and better-received films of the...
TV Time

TV Time

|Nate Logsdon| Wim Wenders couldn’t find reality anywhere. In the Spring of 1983, he had traveled to Tokyo to mark the 20th anniversary of Yasujirō Ozu’s death. He was seeking the Japanese world that appeared so luminously in the films of that great director, whose body of work...
TraditionVision: Ozu’s Exploration of the Multi-Generational Adjustment to TV

TraditionVision: Ozu’s Exploration of the Multi-Generational Adjustment to TV

|Dan Howard| In this day in age, television is just as common and almost essential to our daily lives as food or nature. Sometimes, it feels like it’s just always been around, but in fact, the first concept of what would ultimately become television, Facsimile Transmissions, was introduced...