Recently added articles from Film Criticism:
On the dialectics of filmic colors (in general) and red (in particular): Three Colors: Red, Red Desert, Cries and Whispers, and The Double Life of Veronique.
Mar 22, 2008; ... One of the most powerful theorizations of color, as one might expect, stems from Sergei Eisenstein, and appears in his late-1930s drafts of Towards a Theory of Montage (Eisenstein 254-67). The theory is proleptic of Eisenstein's actual acquisition of color film, which occurred when the Red ...
Mike Leigh's High Hopes: troubling home in Thatcher's Britain.(Margaret Thatcher)
Mar 22, 2008; ... Much of English filmmaker Mike Leigh's work between the late 1970s and early 1990s reflects a passionate critique of the economic and social policies of Thatcherism, addressing a British society that had turned its back on the political and social consensus of the previous forty years ....
Bodies, bullets, and bad guys: elements of the hardbody film.(action movies)
Mar 22, 2008; ... Within film scholarship it has often been taken for granted that contemporary Hollywood action films are "dumb movies for dumb people" (Tasker 1994, 5), viewed as inherently conservative, superficially spectacular, and narratively simplistic. (1) Critics have traditionally not analyzed the ...
"You must never listen to this": lessons on sound, cinema, and mortality from Herzog's Grizzly Man.(Werner Herzog)
Mar 22, 2008; ... Herzog: I think you should not keep it. You should destroy it. Palovak: Yeah? Herzog: I think that's what you should do. Palovak: Okay. Herzog: Because it will be the white elephant in your room all your life. --Werner Herzog and ...
58th Berlin Film Festival, 2008.(Festivals)
Mar 22, 2008; ... Since its inauguration in 1950s West-Berlin, the Berlin Film Festival has established itself as one of the premiere showcases of new films, both mainstream and independent. Now in its eighth year at its central location on Potsdamer Platz, this year's Berlinale was even bigger and arguably ...
Directed by Steven Spielberg: Poetics of the Contemporary Hollywood Blockbuster.(books about film director Steven Spielberg)(Book review)
Mar 22, 2008; ... Directed By Steven Spielberg: Poetics of the Contemporary Hollywood Blockbuster By Warren Buckland New York: Continuum, 2006 242 pp.: $21.95, paper; $90, cloth Citizen Spielberg By Lester D. Friedman Urbana: University of ...
Postcolonial African Cinema. From Political Engagement to Postmodernism.(Postcolonial African Cinema: Ten Directors)(Book review)
Mar 22, 2008; ... Postcolonial African Cinema. From Political Engagement to Postmodernism By Kenneth W. Harrow Indiana University Press, 2007; xv + 268 pp.; $ 65, hardcover; $ 25.95, paper. Postcolonial African Cinema. Ten Directors By David Murphy and Patrick ...
X-ray visions: radiography, chiaroscuro, and the fantasy of unsuspicion in film noir.(Critical essay)(Cover story)
Dec 22, 2007; ... Introduction Immediately recognizable even to the film noir neophyte is the lighting technique known as chiaroscuro, the angular alternation of dark shadows and stark fields of light across various on-screen surfaces in films such as Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944), The ...
Murder and merrymaking: the "seen" of the Crime in Renoir's 1930s cinema.
Dec 22, 2007; ... In French cinema of the 1930s, murder of both men and women recurs with striking frequency and provides the shattering climax in a number of important films. Jean Renoir's 1931 La Chienne inaugurates a proto-noir atmosphere and plot structure in an urban tale of prostitution and murder, ...
Return to Yuma.(Critical essay)
Dec 22, 2007; ... Delmer Daves's 3.10 to Yuma (1957) is a psychological fable concerning the male libido and its discontents. The film focuses on the inner lives of its two leading men, illuminating their interiority primarily through its two substantial female characters. Such disturbing insights into the ...
The 57th Berlin Film Festival.(Festivals)
Dec 22, 2007; ... The Berlin Film Festival, held annually in February, has long laid claim to its position as second only to Cannes among the most important showcases for international features. Although the weather in the German capital is usually dreary this time of the year, the program is anything but ....
Cannes Film Festival, 2007.(Festivals)
Dec 22, 2007; ... Cannes had its share of moody films this year: movies which seemed to exist only to draw spectators into a universe of surreal emotion. The best among these mood pieces was Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park. Acclaimed cinematographer Chris Doyle's camera follows an introverted adolescent as he ...
Francois Truffaut and Friends: Modernism, Sexuality and Film Adaptation.(Book review)
Dec 22, 2007; ... Francois Truffaut and Friends." Modernism, Sexuality and Film Adaptation By Robert Stam Rutgers University Press, 2006; 239 pp.; $62, hardcover; $23.95, paper. "The film of tomorrow appears to me as even more personal than an individual and autobiographical novel, like a ...
Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film.(Book review)
Dec 22, 2007; ... Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film. By Jeffrey Skoller. Univeristy of Minnesota Press, 2005. xlvi + 233 pp. $25 paper, $75 cloth. Jeffrey Skoller's Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film offers fascinating insights into both film ...
Cinephilia and History, or, The Wind in the Trees.(Book review)
Dec 22, 2007; ... Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees By Christian Keathley Indiana University Press, 2006; 212 pp.; $19.95 paper In his ambitious and engaging new work, Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees, Christian Keathley aims to accomplish two goals: to write "one ...
In memoriam.(In memoriam)
Sep 22, 2007; ... Although Ingmar Bergman's death had long been anticipated, no more so than by the hypochondriacal director himself, it struck me in a surprisingly personal way when I learned of it yesterday, just days before this issue went to press. I have not felt such loss at the passing of a public ...
Digital visual effects and popular cinema: an introduction.
Sep 22, 2007; ... As this issue goes into production in June 2007, multiplexes around the United States are bracing for audiences certain to flock to cinemas to see Spider-Man 3, Pirates of the Caribbean. At World's End, Shrek the Third, and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Aside from the fact ...
Digital heroes in contemporary Hollywood: exertion, identification, and the virtual action body.(Cover story)
Sep 22, 2007; ... The arrival and increasing ubiquity of digital imaging has sparked renewed debates in some quarters about the ontology of the photographic image over the last fifteen years or so, in relation to both still photography and cinema. Breathlessly predicted amongst these responses was the death ...
The migration of forms: bullet time as microgenre.
Sep 22, 2007; ... Only minutes into The Matrix (Larry and Andy Wachowski, 1999), the movie unveils its money shot, as though aware the audience is impatient for it. Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), clad in skintight black leather, punctuates a brief, violent hotel room fight by spreading her arms, rising into ...
Sensing an intellectual nemesis.
Sep 22, 2007; ... The period of grand theory, which saw film studies secure its position as an academic discipline, was marked by a cinephobia that resulted in film academics seeing as their responsibility the systematic undermining and exposure of virtually all of the most basic cinematic pleasures--this ...