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On November 13, 1854, Alfred Lord Tennyson opened his morning newspaper, eager for word from far-off Crimea. He read about the Light Brigade, the six hundred cavalry troopers ordered to charge a heavily defended fort, and about their subsequent slaughter. Moved by their courage and sacrifice, Tennyson wrote a poem. Tennyson was, of course, an abominable poet. A Victorian to […]
Werner Herzog, the German filmmaker and Baby Yoda enthusiast, doesn’t much like chickens. In his view, chickens embody “a kind of bottomless stupidity, a fiendish stupidity. They are the most horrifying, cannibalistic, nightmarish creatures in the world.” Mr. Herzog is not alone in this estimation. Showmen and grifters train these birds to dance, play checkers, and perform tricks not because […]
December here in film town is just November, but more. Like last month, the major studios will drop awards contenders just before their submission deadlines. Aging auteurs will release overlong reflections on their encroaching mortality. When the holiday season hits, Disney IP will capture the imagination of every living child and man-child, and hopefully entertain the rest of us enough […]
It’s never “just a movie.” No matter the pedigree, quality, or budget, filmmakers use their medium not just to tell stories and entertain but to engage viewers in some kind of sociopolitical-economic commentary, regardless if it’s Steven Spielberg or Jane Campion or Roger Corman or Ed Wood behind the camera. And when some director deflects with “it’s just a movie,” […]
Welcome to October, the third-best month of the film release calendar! It’s not quite Oscar season, but the major film festivals have concluded, and the word-of-mouth awards campaigns are roaring to life. So, after a long summer of comic book blockbusters, Disney IP, low-budget horror flicks, and the occasional indie darling, October promises a cineplex packed with…comic book blockbusters, Disney […]
“Space,” goes the old cliche, “is the final frontier.” With terrestrial limits all but explored, it comes as no great shock that filmmakers from Kubrick to Christopher Nolan to Claire Denis have time and again tested the limits of their storytelling prowess in the stars. Implicit in the infinite vacuum is the promise of better and more interesting worlds, […]
Fetishizing Black men The thirst for gratification, validation, and power often leads many men, prominent and not, to destroy their own lives as well as the lives of others. The story of Ed Buck and his victims is one that involves wealth, deadly fetishes, meth, and racism. Here’s what you need to know. Fetish: a form of sexual desire in […]
Orson Welles once described Harry Lime, his character in The Third Man (1949), as the greatest star part ever written. “It’s where they talk about you for an hour and then you appear,” he explained to friend and filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich. It took 70 years, but Welles’s Lime has a challenge for star-part supremacy in Toni Servillo’s Silvio Berlusconi — […]
Dag Hammarskjöld was a Secretary General of the United Nations, a Nobel laureate, a staunch anti-imperialist, and, according to a certain Jack Kennedy, “the greatest statesman of our century.” On September 18, 1961, while en route to a small Rhodesian airport, his plane crashed, killing all on board. In his newest film, Cold Case Hammarskjöld, Danish documentarian and provocateur Mads […]
If you could make everyone believe you were a good person, would you ever bother to actually be one? That’s the central question of the third season of creator Noah Hawley and FX’s “Legion,” a run-off of the “X-Men” series. What’s odd is that the question isn’t asked by the show’s protagonist, David Haller, who discovers his diagnosis around schizophrenia […]