|Matt Lambert| Too often in criticism, there is a lens from the future looking back at the past in judgement. To be clear, I’m struggling with that urge in reviewing The Night Porter. The 1974 film directed by Liliana Cavani examines the sadomasochistic relationship… Continue reading
|Veda Lawrence| For someone whose exposure to Holocaust literature has come mostly from the diary of Anne Frank, or the Boy in the Striped Pajamas, or even Life is Beautiful, a film like The Night Porter stands as a stark and offensive antithesis to the almost sanitized narratives that… Continue reading
|Daniel McCabe| Imagine, if you will, that the art of animation disappeared. You had to choose one film to reconstruct the entire art form, from the silliest children’s YouTube video to the most profound Studio Ghibli opus. You get to choose one film to base this reconstruction upon. Continue reading
|Ryan Sanderson| If you grew up in the eighties or nineties, particularly in the American Midwest, there’s a strong chance you discovered your cinephilia via a VHS rerelease from the Disney vault. The Fantasia fiftieth anniversary edition, for instance, tore across American theaters in 1990… Continue reading
|John Blair| It has been over 30 years since I first saw Legend as a child. I retained strong memories of certain images: the magical light of the opening scenes, the oversized horns of the Lord of Darkness, the fact that there was definitely a unicorn in the movie. I knew it starred Tom Cruise, Continue reading
|Courtney Kowalke| What is the first movie you remember seeing Tim Curry in? It is a question of when you first saw him in something, not if you have ever seen him in something. The British actor has been an inescapable presence on the silver screen since 1975. Incidentally, Continue reading
|Malcolm Cooke| In the misty and magical realm of Urland lurks a dark and evil creature: The last dragon, one thousand years old. It holds the surrounding land in the violent grip of fear. The king is forced to sacrifice virgins, chosen from a lottery twice a year, to sate the dragon’s sadistic… Continue reading
|Zach Staads| Before I sat down to watch Notorious, before I knew it was a Hitchcock film, before I’d seen a single frame, still, or trailer, I saw the Criterion cover. It was a very simple picture: Two people embracing, one facing away, and the other, Ingrid Bergman, facing out… Continue reading
|Hannah Baxter| Kinji Fukasaku and Shinichi “Sonny” Chiba, who stars in Samurai Reincarnation (1981), collaborated regularly throughout Fukasaku’s 40-year, genre-straddling directorial career. Chiba appeared in nearly a third of Fukasaku’s output, including the first four movies… Continue reading
|Michael Popham| George Fucking Lucas. I was 12 years old when I first saw Star Wars at the Mann Theater on Hennepin Avenue. It was the summer of 1977 and the movie hit me like a gravel truck. I had never seen anything like it before, and my friends and I agreed that there… Continue reading
|Matthew Christensen| A lot of what’s been written about Alfred Hitchock’s Shadow of a Doubt has to do with the use of doubles. As with Strangers on a Train (1951), these dichotomies invite us to look at the muddied line between good and evil, and in doing so expose “what lurks underneath… Continue reading
|Daniel McCabe| Strangers on a Train (1951) comes from the darkness, and not only because Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) shot the film in black and white. It draws influences from the German Expressionist films of the 1920s to create a foreboding mood while using the conventions… Continue reading
|Dylan Hawthron| Before we actually start the movie, though, we see the Warner Bros. logo, followed by a screen announcing the lead actors: Farley Granger Mr. Granger appears by arrangement with Samuel Goldwyn Ruth Roman Robert Walker The fine print sticks out in an otherwise… Continue reading
|Dylan Hawthorn| Spoiler alert for Shadow of a Doubt. About ten minutes into Shadow of a Doubt, Charlotte “Charlie” Newton (Teresa Wright) lies in her bed, hands behind her head, staring at the ceiling. The camera had been relishing in the domestic bliss of her hometown… Continue reading
|Timothy Zila| I never saw Conan the Barbarian growing up, nor did I read any of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories. But I thought I knew what to expect based on my impression of the vibrant covers depicting a burly, muscle-bursting man in a loincloth next to a busty woman wearing… Continue reading
|Chris Ryba-Tures| “My fear is that my sons will never understand me,” says the Khitan General, his war council babbling all around him while the stone-faced barbarian, Conan, sits cross-legged on a table centered in their yurt. It feels like a throwaway line at first, a bit of conversational… Continue reading
| Dan Howard | The Lady Vanishes plays at the Heights Theater on Thursday, April 4th. Visit trylon.org for tickets and more information. For years, Alfred Hitchcock was simply a name and a face to me. Yes, he is one of the greatest directors of cinema, but his work had never resonated… Continue reading
|Malcolm Cooke| At the start of The Wrong Man, a darkly silhouetted Alfred Hitchcock declares this film is different from all the ones he has made before: this story is true, and he intends to tell it with clinical accuracy. Hitchcock takes this task seriously, so seriously in fact that critic… Continue reading
|Chris Polley| This was how it all began, really—music that’s performed, visuals that are projected, and never a word is uttered. Dating back to the first public presentation of the works of the Lumière brothers in Paris back in 1895, musical accompaniment to a film exhibition was performed… Continue reading
|Dan Howard| My first foray into Bong Joon-Ho’s unparalleled cinematic mind was at the very start of the COVID-19 shutdown. While confined to my home like everyone else, I took the opportunity to catch up on some movies I hadn’t seen, and Parasite was one of the first films… Continue reading
|Cole Seidl| Paranoia is mainstream again. Since September 11th, 2001, the American collective unconscious has been building towards a degree of paranoiac saturation unseen since the golden age of conspiratorial thinking in the 1970s. On September 16th, 2001, Susan Sontag published Continue reading
|Matthew Lambert| Strange Days Holds the Niche Noir Title Belt. Can you remember the first noir you ever saw? Let me guess, did it star Humphrey Bogart? For the most part, people understand what makes noir films one of the most popular genres in cinematic history: a private… Continue reading
|Azra Thakur| Four or five years ago, a colleague and I went out for lunch in downtown Saint Paul. We’d started our jobs within a couple of months of each other and were new to working in Lowertown, trying to find vegetarian-friendly restaurants to get a break from bringing… Continue reading
|Courtney Kowalke| Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005) is my Die Hard. It is a Christmas movie, and I defend it as such with my life. Every year since I first saw it in 2007, I trot it out in December alongside the standard fare like A Charlie Brown Christmas and Love Actually. One could… Continue reading
|Sophie Durbin| When distilled down to one sentence, the plot of The Long Good Friday might go something like this: “An English gangster, two American businessmen, and some Irish nationalists all have a very bad day.” It reads like the opener to a deadpan joke at a party full of… Continue reading
|Jake Rudegeair| As hard as we pleaded and begged, we couldn’t get mom to take us to Blockbuster every day. In the 90s, we had to rely on the cabinet VHS collection, stuffed with ancient treasures like Key Largo, Terminator 2, and taped copies of whatever dad… Continue reading
|Ryan Sanderson| One could argue that every Terry Gilliam film is a magnum opus—Time Bandits, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Fisher King, even Lost in La Mancha feels like a definitive statement about human nature in which Gilliam serves as… Continue reading
|Timothy Zila| When we meet Sam Lowry, the protagonist of Brazil, he’s flying. High above the clouds, clothed in a plastic-looking breast piece borrowed from a cosplayer’s wardrobe and feathery wings fit for a campy theater production. There is no clear purpose in his flight— Continue reading
|Finn Odum| 0. The Fool. I’ve always had a thing for weird little freaks. They’re exactly what they sound like: people whose behavior is absurd or unsettling. They have complicated relationships with subjects like sex, drugs, and religion. They can be repressed or unhinged… Continue reading
|Jay Ditzer| A new wave band and three guys named William team up for movie soundtrack magic. Like most film directors, the late great William Friedkin had a career of peaks and valleys. After getting his start in a Chicago TV station’s mail room, he eventually began directing… Continue reading
|Lucas Hardwick| (And behold, let thine eyes be warned; yay verily, here there be spoilers, so sayeth the Lord.)
One of the cornerstones of any healthy marriage is to go out on a date once in a while. Occasionally, I like to take Mrs. Hardwick to a fancy joint like the McDonald’s… Continue reading
|Luke Mosher| Among the many kinds of new films released every year, I often find animation the most exciting. The form is endlessly mailable, and animators are always finding new techniques to dazzle and new worlds to explore. Takehide Hori’s one-man production… Continue reading
|Michael Wellvang| Abel Ferrara’s King of New York is not a “great movie.” Nor is it trying to be. The timing of its release, just nine days after Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, has invited unfair but inevitable comparisons that plagued the film since before it was ever shown. Continue reading
|Brogan Earney| In the year 1987, masculine energy was at an all-time high in cinema. Movie fans all over the country flocked to theaters to watch their heroes do the impossible. Whether it was Dutch and Dillon handshaking their way through an alien Predator… Continue reading
|Luke Mosher| György Fehér’s Twilight (1990) opens with an aerial shot over the forested Hungarian mountain Csóványos while an ambient song drones in the background like the hum of an airplane. On the ground below, two dark figures ride in the back… Continue reading
|Casey Jarrin| Every morning in tenth grade, I’d press PLAY on my Panasonic VCR, the opening sequence of Apocalypse Now cued up and ready to explode into orange-red-pink pyrotechnics of helicopter-war-as-cinema-painting, soundtracked by Jim Morrison’s… Continue reading
|Lucas Hardwick| High school…shit; I was still only in high school. Every day I thought I was gonna wake up and that book report would be done. I’d wake up and there’d be nothing written, and not much read. I hardly said a word to my sophomore English teacher until I said… Continue reading
|Nick Kouhi| It’s easy to label Brian De Palma’s work as an extended exercise in voyeurism. But in a career spanning over half a century, the enfant terrible of the New Hollywood has transcended charges of Hitchockian pastiche with his perspicaciously (and…. Continue reading
|Courtney Kowalke| I cannot escape the reach of Ancient Greek theater. The last piece I wrote for Perisphere was about Mai Zetterling’s The Girls and a fictional production of Aristophanes’ comedy Lysistrata. It turns out a large part of director Brian DePalma’s inspiration for… Continue reading
|Yuval Klein| Three students and a chaperone at an all-girls college disappear during a field trip at Hanging Rock, an Australian former volcano that is 6.25 million years old. The repercussions and philosophical symbols entice viewers for the latter part of the film. Much of the film is… Continue reading
