|Bob Aulert| Up in the air, Junior Birdman The Rocketeer (1991) blends nostalgia, adventure, romance, and patriotism into a classic superhero narrative. Set in the golden age of aviation during the late 1930s, it’s an adaptation of Dave Stevens’s comic book series of the same name… Continue reading
|Malcolm Cooke| Werner Herzog has one thing to say to the proponents of Cinéma Vérité: “‘Happy New Year, losers.’”1 Herzog has always had beef with the idea of documentary as from the perspective of a fly on the wall, a genre of detached and objective reporting of facts. “That… Continue reading
|Dan McCabe| In 1999, acclaimed German filmmaker Werner Herzog came to the Walker Art Center for an on-stage interview with the late film critic Roger Ebert. During the interview, Herzog made his “Minnesota Declaration”—a twelve-point denunciation of Cinema Verité, a style of documentary… Continue reading
|Reid Lemker| What was the first “adult” movie you saw as a kid? For me, the first movie that comes to mind is Where Eagles Dare. I was probably ten or eleven when my dad first showed it to me, and it quickly became a favorite of ours to watch on… Continue reading
|Devin Bee| Where Eagles Dare is a film of clashes. The story sounds simple enough: during World War II, an American general is held captive by Nazis in a Bavarian castle. An elite squad of Allied soldiers—six British and one American—are tasked with infiltrating the castle and saving the… Continue reading
|Ed Dykhuizen| Female directors were commonplace, even at times dominant, in early film history. Alice Guy-Blaché directed more than 450 short films starting in 1896. Many scholars credit her with the first movie that had a narrative. In these earliest years, small companies… Continue reading
|Lucille Hanson| (The following contains spoilers for Merrily We Go To Hell.) Before writing this for Perisphere, I had seen Merrily only once before: a couple years ago, during a rare day where I watched numerous movies back to back (I cannot believe that I bookended this with Saw VI and Bamboozled.). I ended up leaving… Continue reading
|Penny Folger| Hitler stands in a town square in Poland while dumbfounded townspeople encircle him, looking as though they’re witnessing a talking polar bear, or perhaps something much more absurd and dangerous. A small girl in the crowd suddenly pipes up, “May I have… Continue reading
|Chris Ryba-Tures| It’s taken me a long, long time to admit this to myself: hating stuff isn’t very cool. Hating something, especially when you make that hate part of your personality, a talking point at parties, a fulcrum to get a rise out of folks, is pretty tedious, exhausting, and boring, isn’t it? Continue reading
|Dan McCabe| I recently visited New York, and as I walked along West 45th Street through its famous theater district, I couldn’t help but imagine the marquees that came and went from the Great White Way over the last century. One such show, opening in 1959, was The Sound of Music Continue reading
