|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… Continue reading
|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… Continue reading
|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… Continue reading
|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… Continue reading
|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… Continue reading
|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… Continue reading
|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… Continue reading
|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 Continue reading
|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… Continue reading
|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… Continue reading
