Recently added articles from Film Criticism:
Gun Crazy: cinematic amour fou.(Critical essay)
Sep 22, 2008; ... "The world moves on a woman's hips."--"The Great Curve," The Talking Heads Muero porque no muero. (I die because I do not die.) --St. Teresa of Avila Overture A boy appears onscreen; he moves forward--straight towards us, as it were--and as he ...
Gender hierarchy and environmental crisis in Tsai Ming-liang's The Hole.(Critical essay)
Sep 22, 2008; ... Known as Taiwan's Fassbinder, Tsai Ming-liang inherits the spirit of European New Wave Cinema and adopts modernist/ postmodernist aesthetics, minimalist style, and diasporic sentiment to explore various facets of contemporary Taiwanese society. (1) His films often portray outsiders ...
Tarzan vs. IBM: humans and computers in Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville.(Critical essay)
Sep 22, 2008; ... In contrast with the utopian perspectives on science and technology that pervaded much of the discourse concerning computers in the 1960s, Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville [Alphaville, une etrange aventure de Lemmy Caution] (1965) explores an alternative, humanist critique of ...
Cannes 2008: the well-made film.(Festivals)
Sep 22, 2008; ... The film that won at Cannes this year, Laurent Cantet's Entre les tours, offered a flesh semi-documentary look at French adolescents in a classroom. The director had created a real class of teenagers in the 20th arrondissement of Paris and filmed them for a year. The script, loosely based ...
The Virtual Life of Film.(Book review)
Sep 22, 2008; ... The Virtual Life of Film. By D. N. Rodowick Harvard University Press, 2007. xiv + 193 pp. $24.95 paper, $55 cloth. Like the self-contained narratives of the classic Hollywood structure, the ontology of film would be neither terribly interesting nor ...
The Cinematic Tango: Contemporary Argentine Film.(Book review)
Sep 22, 2008; ... The Cinematic Tango: Contemporary Argentine Film. By Tamara L. Falicov. Wallflower Press, 2006, viii + 188 pages, $25 paper, $80 cloth. At the start of her study of Argentine cinema, Tamara L. Falicov puts forward a very apt, visual, and culturally grounded ...
Uncanny Bodies: The Coming of Sound Film and the Origins of the Horror Genre.(Book review)
Sep 22, 2008; ... Uncanny Bodies: The Coming of Sound Film and the Origins of the Horror Genre. By Robert Spadoni Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Aside from brief excursions into American (and partially German) horror films of the late silent and early sound ...
The Philosophy of Martin Scorsese.(Book review)
Sep 22, 2008; ... The Philosophy of Martin Scorsese. Edited by Mark T. Conard Lexington: University of Kentucky P, 2007. 256 pp. $35.00 (cloth). Similar to literary studies, where one rarely finds a monograph that considers a single author anymore, the academic attention ...
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 ...