|Chris Polley| Nine years ago, as is the American way, a viral car commercial brought us all together. Advertising Volvo’s state-of-the-art dynamic steering, it showed a chiseled man in his 50s atop two large trucks, his stance wide and firm, with one foot planted on each of the behemoths’… Continue reading
|MH Rowe| In film, physiognomy is destiny. Because this is so, the face of Yves Montand is perfectly suited for a destiny shared by so many men and women in mid-century dramas, from Hollywood and beyond: being tired. The tiredness of Montand in Alain Resnais’s La Guerre est finie (1966… Continue reading
|Luke Mosher| This essay contains spoilers for the film Z. Costa-Gavras’s 1969 film Z is a fictionalized account of the 1963 assassination of the Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis by the Greek government. The title refers not to our English Z but the Greek letter Zeta, which protesters… Continue reading
|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
|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
|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
