Invisible Divisions: Post-War Provocations in Carol Reed’s The Man Between
Dismantling a Monolith of Misery: Finding Hope Amid State-Protected Violence in Kenji Mizoguchi’s Sansho the Bailiff
Life After Wartime: Ozu’s Darker Side
Invisible Divisions: Post-War Provocations in Carol Reed’s The Man Between
|Chris Polley| Borders are fake, but people are real. Director Carol Reed knew this better than most others who have trafficked in spy thrillers and political noir over the years. And while The Man Between is typically less regarded than his prior masterpieces The Third Man...
Dismantling a Monolith of Misery: Finding Hope Amid State-Protected Violence in Kenji Mizoguchi’s Sansho the Bailiff
|Chris Polley| Breaking up families, the oppressed becoming the oppressor, the government sanctioning open and wanton cruelty on the streets—sound familiar? When I got offered the chance to write about Kenji Mizoguchi’s folktale-inspired 1954 epic Sansho the Bailiff this past winter amid Operation Metro Surge and just weeks after the murders of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, I immediately felt the connection. It was deep in my bones.
Life After Wartime: Ozu’s Darker Side
|Dan Howard| Since the end of World War II, hundreds of, if not over a thousand, films have been made about it, capturing varying themes from fighting on the front lines, infiltrating the Third Reich, the effect of the war on innocent bystanders, etc. Yet, the WWII films I find myself drawn to are...
Hijinks in Hitchcockland: Family Plot
|Penny Folger| Family Plot, Alfred Hitchcock’s final feature film, turns 50 this year, and while often overlooked, it's a delightful and, dare I say, light comedy? But how could the director so often associated with murder have made something… cute? (Fortunately...
Who’s Buried in the Plot?
|Patrick Clifford| In the 1976 film Family Plot, the word plot refers to a piece of land where a family is seemingly buried. The family who owns the plot is the Shoebridge family. Both details say very little about the “storyline” definition of plot. But Family Plot is a film by Alfred Hitchcock...
Bombed About A Bit: or, What’s a Little Misunderstanding Between Friends?
|Ian Taylor| Two gentlemen are sitting in a railway carriage, traveling through London. As the train slows down at a station, the first man looks out the window and says, "Is this Wembley?" The second man, gauging, replies, "No, it’s Thursday." The first man nods thoughtfully and says...
A Walk Through the Ruins with Love and Nihilism: The Third Man
|John Costello| For all its intrigue, racketeering, grift, occasional death, and rubble, The Third Man (1949) maintains a persistent optimism. Zither music strings us through chase scenes across Vienna's war-damaged landscapes and down shadowy passages. The movie's action includes...
The Process of Falling: Hitchcock, The Process Shot, and the Unreality of Eva Marie Saint’s Purse in NORTH BY NORTHWEST
|Wil McMillen| Sometimes you see a thing, and then you can’t unsee it. I’m sorry for what I’m about to do, but I’m about to ruin the ending of North by Northwest for you. I blame my wife for this. Proceed with caution if you don’t want to know how the magic works. When we were dating...
Miami Vice and Michael Mann’s City Vibes Films
|Ryan Sanderson| Rorschach-like light patterns on large screens. Bodies gyrating rhythmically. Some dancers truly really feel the rhythm. Others just pump their fists and play along. I’m not great at reading crowds, but the ratio of pretenders to true believers doesn’t seem great...
Collateral’s Unintentional Influence on No-Budget Digital Cinema
|Tim Schwagel| When I eagerly popped in my copy of Collateral to prepare for this article, I had a lot of potential topics rattling around in my head. I could ramble for days about the magic of films that take place over one night, the overt themes of not letting perfection get in the...
The Cabbie and the Hitman: How Jamie Foxx and Tom Cruise Created Memorable Characters in Michael Mann’s Collateral
|Dan McCabe| I first saw Collateral when it came out in theaters during late summer of 2004. A friend and I saw it on a whim after an evening round of golf. On the way to the multiplex, we passed a car driving at night with its lights off. The sun had set not long ago, so it’s quite possible the...
Of Late Nights and High Detail: Michael Mann’s Heat (1995)
|Dan McCabe| When I was a college student, I worked at the front desk of my dorm. The shelf beneath the window stored a few hundred VHS tapes, which residents could rent by dropping off their university ID card. One rather uneventful night, I browsed...
The Sun Rises and Sets with Heat
|Natalie Marlin| Hamlet is no more a play about a prince seeking revenge than it is about any of its other threads—nationalistic aristocratic decay, melancholic humors, loss inciting psychiatric madness. Patsies cast off to certain death, mere pawns in power plays. Blood begetting more blood, until it is entirely...
A City Without Community: The Lack of Neighborliness in Rear Window
|Andrew Neill| Let’s start with a trigger warning for the film Rear Window: the dog dies. The sensitivity around this subject is prevalent, powerful, and worthy of respect. There’s a whole site where a community of people compile trigger warnings for sensitive content in media...
These Are the People in Your Neighborhood: Rear Window and Community as Worldbuilding
|Courtney Kowalke| If I were a character in Rear Window (1954), I would be the woman who lives above Lars and Anna Thorwald with her husband and their dog. I have thought about this a lot—Rear Window is one of my all-time favorite movies. I don’t know how many times I’ve watched...
Mindhunters, Maneaters, & Maniacs: The Seismic Impact of Manhunter
|Jackson Stern| “You owe me awe,” says the fictional serial killer at the darkened core of Manhunter. Lucky for him, the moviegoing public not only met his demand but put it on a pedestal. In the four decades since the film’s release, Michael Mann’s third theatrical feature has become the...
Now THAT’S What I Call a “Cell Phone:” Brian Cox’s Hannibal Lecktor
|Jay Ditzer| Will Graham: I thought you might be curious to see if you’re smarter than the person I’m looking for. Dr. Hannibal Lecktor: Then by implication, you think you’re smarter than me since you caught me. Will Graham: I know that I'm not smarter than you. Dr. Hannibal...
Thief: That One Last Job and the American Dream
|Sophie Durbin| “Frank unfolds his wallet to place the letter inside. A tattered paste-up collage is there, too. He opens it. There's a white house from a magazine. A cut-out Cadillac is glued in front. Bits and pieces of trees are drawn in with green Pentel. A small baby from a Gerber food ad...
How Hitchcock Changed Horror: Psycho at Sixty-Six
|Clare Brownlee| Hitchcock is considered one of the enduring masters of the horror genre, and his 1960 film Psycho is no exception to that renowned filmography. It not only started a new kind of horror movie entirely, but maintains a legacy as one of the greatest in the genre. I’m not...
The Transformative Power of Girl on Top: Death, Sex, and Agency in The Terminator
|Chelli Riddiough| The Terminator isn’t a very horny film, unless you’re into feathered mullets and homicidal Austrians. But inside this ‘80s action thriller lives a love story, and not one, but two, very weird sex scenes. That’s enough to catapult it into a genre I call “cyberspunk.” When The Terminator begins, our protagonist...
Shark Cents: Deep Blue Sea’s Place in the Value of Warner Bros. Discovery
|Ben Jarman| Memories of Deep Blue Sea’s initial release still stick with me even though I never went to see it. I remember the smart shark gimmick and Samuel L. Jackson yelling, “Just what the hell did you do to those sharks!” in the trailer. I also remember...
“I’m Mad As Hell!”Network And The Profits Of Rage
|Wil McMillen| Network plays in at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, March 27th, through Sunday, March 29th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org. My first day as a national news photographer was December 19, 1998, one of the most important and crazy days that nobody ever talks about....
Toward a Cinema of Noise: Demonlover (2002)
|Natalie Marlin| Noise was roiling in Olivier Assayas’s blood as the 20th century neared a close. At the end of his 1996 film Irma Vep, the director of the film-within-a-film has disavowed his initial attempt at a conventional filmmaking style. The star has left the picture. The narrative is...
They Live in the Twin Cities
|Lucas Vonasek| John Carpenter’s They Live (1988) begins bleakly. Train horns moan as they clatter along the rails, surveillance helicopters chop through the air above in staccato, and smog drapes a city dominated by monolithic buildings clad with corporate logos. These structures...
On the Road to Matewan
|Nate Logsdon| On January 5, 1970, Jock Yablonski was found dead in his home alongside the bodies of his wife and adult daughter. They had been shot six days earlier, on New Year’s Eve. Yablonski was a Pennsylvania coal miner who became...
The Badlands of Downtown LA
|Brogan Earney| If you’re like me and you grew up in Minnesota in the 90s or early 2000s, then we can all agree that Gordon Bombay was the shit. I first saw the Mighty Ducks films when I was 6 years old, and I quickly latched onto the character and looked up to his methodology, and I wasn’t even a hockey player. Over time, I realized that...
The Tragedies Play Well: Akira Kurosawa’s Three-Time Love Affair with Shakespeare
|Dan Howard| Before anything was “Lynchian,” “Altmanesque,” or “Kafkaesque,” it was “Shakespearean.” For the last four centuries, William Shakespeare’s deep-seated insight into the emotion and moral complexity of the human experience continues to enthrall audiences to this very day. Every actor...
Shout Out to Ellen Ripley: How Regular Heroes Inspire Us in Our Darkest Times
|Allison Vincent| When I initially pitched this idea for Alien to Perisphere, I intended to write a snarky, humor-laden essay about the trope of smart women who are ignored in horror/sci-fi films until the very loud, usually mustachioed men who did the ignoring succumb to their dumb, ...
A Lengthy and Mundane Explanation of the Fashion Hierarchy of Men in Brazil’s Well-Oiled Government Machine and Absolutely, Positively, 100% Nothing Else
|Zach Staads| If you really want to make a statement, affect some real change and be an upstanding, ambitious member of the bureaucratic body that keeps the lights on*—you should know the importance of bureau fashion and the importance it plays in...
Human Enough
|Harry Mackin| "Did you ever take that test yourself?" Whenever an institution of power has wanted to exploit, enslave, or just murder another group of people, they've gotten away with it by convincing everyone else that group isn't really human. There have been...
I am the One and Only: Moon and the Advent of Loneliness
|Nicole Rojas-Oltmanns| In 2020 when COVID-19 shut down most of our social connections, I, like many caregivers, was the opposite of lonely. While so many were alone at home, I was inundated with constant human interaction. While I had purpose...
“That Means You Don’t Talk”: Michael Mann’s The Insider
|Steve Rybin| Four years separate Michael Mann’s crime drama Heat (1995) and his next movie, The Insider (1999). While Heat’smonumental pairing of Al Pacino and Robert De Niro is considered by many to be the highlight of the director’s career, The Insider remains the Mann film...
The Art of the Reference in Who Framed Roger Rabbit
|Jackson Stern| I remember when I was eleven or twelve and I watched Who Framed Roger Rabbit for the first time. Around the age of ten, I caught the cinephile bug after discovering classics like King Kong and Casablanca but before that
Michael Clayton and Tony Gilroy’s American Conscience
|Ryan Sanderson| Michael Clayton plays in glorious 35mm at the Trylon Cinema from Sunday, March 1st, through Tuesday, March 3rd. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org. “You sharpen the human appetite to the point where it can split atoms with its desire, you build egos the size...
Loc-Nar Never Stood a Chance
|Elizabeth Mathers| My (unknowing) introduction to Heavy Metal (1981) was South Park's Season 12, Episode 3 "Major Boobage." An absolutely transcendent piece of comedy. I know others also took this episode as an entry point into finding one of the greatest animated films. Heavy Metal is the gift that keeps on giving—great art,...
CARTOONS! CHAOS! CLASSIC ROCK! How HEAVY METAL Almost Became What I Wanted—and Why That Almost Matters
|Jay Ditzer| The reputation of the animated cult classic Heavy Metal rests on promises it largely can’t keep. Sure, it’s full of sex, drugs, and rock ’n roll, at least superficially. What it actually delivers is something more revealing. The film is deeply of its era, which is both a strength and a weakness.
Folsom Prison Plays Itself
|J.R. Jones| Opened in 1880, about 12 miles north of San Francisco, Folsom State Prison occupies the former site of a mining camp along the American River. The original prison buildings and walls were constructed with hand-cut granite from the surrounding hills, which gives...
When The Wind Blows and How Nostalgia Lies to Us
|Wil McMillen| Everyone is scared. Everyone is broke. Unemployment is skyrocketing. There’s a madman in the White House who is threatening to blow up anyone who looks at him wrong. It’s 1983, and I’m eight years old. Nostalgia for the 1980s is amusing to me. The 80s, at least the early 80s...
Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer Could Make Anything Interesting
|Reid Lemker| Sometimes, it’s a miracle that films get made, and RKO’s 1949 film, The Big Steal, is one of those miracles. Directed by Don Siegel and starring Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, and William Bendix, The Big Steal was originally conceived as a vehicle for RKO star George Raft, but...
Toonami Days: How Anime Like Vampire Hunter D Saved a Small Town Kid
|Andrew Neill| The lights are out except for the TV. Outside of its pulsing glow, the bedroom is painted with deep blue shadows, which extend through the window, out onto the snowy front yard, across the icy street, a few blocks of civilization, and then miles and miles...
My Short Bestselling Memoir about the Japanese Animated Film Vampire Hunter D
|MH Rowe| A lot of art seems gruesome and tasteless when you’re twelve or thirteen years old. It repels and attracts you for exactly that reason. Later, when you’ve reached maturity or thereabouts and are better equipped with the faculty of judgement, you may have a...
American Gigolo: A Film Noir with 1980s Sheen?
|Penny Folger| Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo, starts out with all the luster and flash of the 1980s though it was actually shot in 1979. Yet, stylistically, it preternaturally defines the decade that was to come. “It’s almost setting the...