|Caitlyn Speier| This past year, one of the most kind, smart, and justice-oriented people I’ve ever had the honor of calling a friend voluntarily left this world. Saying goodbye has been utterly… confusing. I suspect in large part because we honestly didn’t talk much anymore… Continue reading
|Courtney Kowalke| Elaine May probably wishes I wasn’t writing this piece. While May adapted, directed, and starred in her 1971 directorial debut, A New Leaf, she was less than pleased with the finished product. Against May’s wishes, her film was edited by Academy Award-winning editors Don… Continue reading
|Terry Serres| Elaine May’s first feature film, A New Leaf, is a production rich in lore. It was based on a short story, “The Green Heart,” written by Jack Ritchie and first appearing in the March 1963 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. The story involves the well-heeled Henry… Continue reading
|Vincent Cheng| CONTEXT What creates the sensation of personal discomfort when watching comedies, and what is the value of that discomfort? To answer these questions, I’d like you to first close your eyes and imagine something funny. Undoubtedly you pictured, as I did… Continue reading
| 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
|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
|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
|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
|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
|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
