|Alex Kies| World historian Herman Schumacher graduates from college into a shot-on-video split-level nightmare. His family won’t return his calls, his old friends don’t like him anymore. He works, dressed in a shirt and tie, digging holes in the forest. His girlfriend might be cheating… Continue reading
|Dan Howard| Looking at the history of cinema, I gravitate the most toward the works produced in the golden age of Japanese cinema during the ‘50s and ‘60s. Although I’m not overly fond of Westerns, a lot of samurai films have been heavily influenced by them. Even Akira Kurosawa took… Continue reading
|Lucas Hardwick| Way back in cable television’s Mesozoic era—when networks like the Independent Film Channel showed, you know, independent films, in the wee hours of Saturday morning right as Friday night’s winos and third-shifters were drifting off to sleep—one could… Continue reading
|Natalie Marlin| Toward the end of the first part of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, set in 1985, the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg visits a dying Roy Cohn, the prosecutor responsible for her execution in a legal witch hunt against her and her husband in the early 1950s, to haunt him in his final… Continue reading
|Azra Thakur| It’s hard to believe Gordon Parks’s Shaft (1971) was released over fifty years ago. Its iconic first scene is still exciting to watch today: from far above, we see John Shaft emerging from a New York City subway staircase to the cold winter outside, set to Isaac Hayes’s… Continue reading
|John Moret| Ronin, noun, historical (in feudal Japan): a wandering samurai who had no lord or master.
On a wintry day in 2012, a friend and I met for our weekly movie and lunch meetup. It was his choice that week and he brought a new release from the Criterion Collection, Three Outlaw Continue reading
|Chelli Riddiough| What’s iconic about Shaft? The theme song. The beige turtleneck and brown pleather trench coat. The sideburns and afro. The $50-an-hour detective fee. The fact that detectives are called “dicks.” The terrible one-liners lauded as wisecracks. The unnecessary sexual Continue reading
|Penny Folger| Night of the Generals is a World War II film most people in this day and age have never heard of. It’s a joint production between the UK, France, and the United States. The story is unique in that it’s told from the German perspective, without demonizing them exactly: instead it… Continue reading
|Eli Holm| Suspended in anticipation, a man named Clerici sits awaiting his cue, a pawn of a larger game, too terrified to sleep, waiting to strike. He’s in a blank slate of ruin, without discernible emotion, putting on his mask of high-class clothing, tucking his gun, braving the winter air, ready.. Continue reading
|Chris Ryba-Tures| “To wear a mask is to literally put on a second face, a second identity—a theatrical identity removed from the everyday world.” –Lesley K. Ferris, Masks: Faces of Culture. Little soul, little wanderer, peeking out / from my body’s cover, host and lodger / which now change… Continue reading
