The Bizarre Adventures of Joe’s Screenwriter, Norman Wexler

| Ed Dykhuizen | Joe plays on glorious 35mm at the Trylon Cinema from Sunday, May 4th, through Tuesday, May 6th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org. In 1967, American studio executives were adrift. Their main target demographic was the legion of young baby boomers who had… Continue reading

Little Man With a Gun in His Hand

|J.R. Jones| When John G. Avildsen’s indie drama Joe opened in New York City in July 1970, violence had erupted across the U.S. over President Nixon’s widening of the Vietnam war to include Cambodia. National Guardsmen had killed four student protesters and wounded nine others… Continue reading

The Grotesque, Memorable Brilliance of Fires on the Plain

|Ryan Sanderson| Fires on the Plain begins with a literal slap to the face. Cruel, jarring, and just a little bit funny. That’s the energy Kon Ichikawa maintains throughout his bleak and disturbing masterpiece which feels like a cross between Apocalypse Now and Bambi. If a film before 1960 captured Continue reading

Chocolat is (not) an Autobiographical Movie

|Malcolm Cooke| Claire Denis moved to Cameroon, the setting of Chocolat, when she was only two months old.1 With a colonial administrator father, she had an itinerant childhood driven by her father’s passion for geography,2 growing up across Burkina Faso, Somalia, and Senegal in… Continue reading

Demolishing Technocratic Fascism

|Lucas Vonasek| Fascism can take many forms. Throughout books and movies, it is often portrayed as overt and obvious villainy where injustice drips from the pronounced canines of the antagonist. Other times, fascism can be seen as a devilishly debonair individual smoothly… Continue reading

The Cooler Blonde: Marjorie Wood, Geek Chic, and Obsessions (with Glasses?)

|Matthew Christensen| “News Item” Men seldom make passes At girls who wear glasses. -Dorothy Parker Let me start off by saying that I never fully understood Scottie Ferguson’s obsession with Madeleine Elster in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. I mean, I get why he falls for her. Kim Novak—playing the part in perfectly coiffed white-blonde hair… Continue reading

Vertigo, La Jetée, and 12 Monkeys: Three Films Where Time is Treated Like Butter in Croissant Dough *Mind Blown Gesture*

|Allison Vincent| I do not identify as a time travel girly. Movies where the laws of time and space are bent need strong foundations for me to enjoy them, otherwise I find myself inundated with intrusive thoughts about logic, the “rules of the universe” (those generated by the… Continue reading

Nocturnal Animals: Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day

|Jackson Stern| Claire Denis has always made monster movies. Or, at least, movies with monsters in them or, most commonly, movies about the survivors of monsters. Most of her films revolve around (or feature in a capacity) people who have intense sense of dread permeating… Continue reading

Terrorists in Tight Spots

|Hannah Baxter| In a world where every other movie ends with a blowout fight between gods, superheroes, or both, with nothing less than the fate of the universe hanging in the balance, isn’t it refreshing when you come across a film that knows how to contain itself? Passenger 57 (1992) Continue reading

Snipes gets his Wings: PASSENGER 57

|Jake Rudegeair| It’s DIE HARD on a plane (or a boat, a bus, a mountain, etc.). This is the Mad-Libs elevator pitch that launched a thousand films (ooh, DIE HARD on an elevator? I guess DIE HARD had elevators, never mind). Of the “DIE HARD on a …” Continue reading