This Just In: Evil is STILL Banal
Pain, Pleasure, and Depiction of Manipulation in The Night Porter
The Life Fantastic: My Lifelong Love Affair with Walt Disney’s Cosmic, Abstract, Terrifying, Horny, and Awe-Inspiring Snuff Film for Children
This Just In: Evil is STILL Banal
|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...
Pain, Pleasure, and Depiction of Manipulation in The Night Porter
|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...
The Life Fantastic: My Lifelong Love Affair with Walt Disney’s Cosmic, Abstract, Terrifying, Horny, and Awe-Inspiring Snuff Film for Children
|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...
Animation Past, Present, and Future: The Scope of Fantasia
|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.
When I’m Bad, I’m Better: Legend and Tim Curry’s Legacy of Villainy
|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,
Before Lift Off: Tom Cruise in Legend
|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,
Cinematic Sorcery: The Legacy of Vermithax Pejorative
|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...
The Abandoned and Forsaken: Prop Departments of Old Hollywood
|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...
Hey, Beastmaster’s On: Epic Fantasy Gets Its Revenge
|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...
Street Fighting Man: Samurai Reincarnation Star Sonny Chiba Was a Kinji Fukasaku Favorite
|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...
Shadow of a Doubt: Ennui’s Disappearance in the Face of Disaster
|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...
“Without Guilt or Remorse”: A Deep Dive into the Life of Hitchcock Star Farley Granger
|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...
From the Darkness: The Influence of German Expressionism on Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train
|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...
Saturday Evening Noir: Shadow of a Doubt
|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...
Fathers True and False in Conan the Barbarian
|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...
Conan the Chad and Tolkien the Virgin
|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...
The Lady Vanishes: Exploring Hitchcock’s Recurring Themes of Spies, Suspense, and the Wrongly Accused
| 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...
Based on a True Story: Hitchcock Between Reality and Subjectivity
|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...
Scoring the Past, Playing in the Present: A Tradition Continues with The Poor Nobodys & Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger at The Heights Theater
|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...
The Rip Van Winkle-Level Sleeper
|Hannah Baxter| How does a movie end up in front of theater audiences? Best case scenario: it’s the product of a major studio, with big stars, a respected director, and/or superheroes. The studio will likely handle distribution and marketing; if not, distributors will pay handsomely
Back to the Future: Michael Roemer’s Nothing but a Man
|Nazeeh Alghazawneh| The idea of someone “being ahead of their time,” whether it be an artist, an author, an activist etc., is kind of paradoxical. The phrase implies that broad social, philosophical or political landscapes will change inevitably, develop autonomously, independently of...
I Feel You, Man: Ridley Scott’s The Duellists
|MH Rowe| Of course we’re supposed to condescend to the idea of a duel. To imagine two people—two men—agreeing to mortal combat with guns or swords over a breach of honor strikes the contemporary and perhaps cynical observer as so fussily absurd, so absurdly dramatic, and so male, that we...
Harvey, the Haughty Hussar
|Alex Kies| In 1977, two years after Stanley Kubrick released Barry Lyndon, Ridley Scott made his filmmaking debut with The Duelists, his own artfully shot Napoleonic epic about the inner lives of petty European men played by incongruously cast Americans. Last year, Scott made...
A Whine and a Whimper: The Death of Law Enforcement’s Lionization in James Mangold’s Cop Land
|Chris Polley| There’s a certain built-in legacy in the alliterative phrase “corrupt cop” that belies its own linguistic paradox (or, perhaps, even its redundancy). The rogue detective, the rule-breaking sheriff, and the trigger-happy officer: even before modern American history...