Essays, comments, and asides (as well as witty one-liners) about film or cinema.
Ari Aster's debut feature film Hereditary (2018) plays on the devilish ambiguity articulating the affinity between the histories of demonic…
The best books and films of 2022, some description thereof, as well as a few of the worst.
Realism lite, how film and television suggest serious violence without actually including it, is exemplified in the 1988 buddy film…
Three curiosities about the lovely 2015 Ryusuke Hamaguchi film about female friendship, "Happy Hour"
In 1979 one of Peter Weir's early films, "The Plumber," saw theatrical release. Little indicated his future.
May reading and viewing of Ashley Vaught in 2022. Best of: "One Crazy Summer" by Rita Williams-Garcia, "Dubliners", and "Wheel…
How do you read and watch narcoleptically? Binging series and reading sparingly, here and there.
"Night Hunter" (2018), a weak serial killer thriller, is no "Night of the Hunter" (1955), a film next to "Citizen…
"The Killing" makes murder a spectacle, something beautiful, peopled with a group of ne'er-do-wells whose destruction we will undoubtedly enjoy.
In Denis Villeneuve's 2010 film "Incendies" siblings seek a brother and father never known to deliver letters from their recently…
"Forbidden Games" (1952) tells a story of how children, uninitiated in the rituals of mourning, recognize the loss of those…
The culture of the exotic, fascinating underworld thrills us in "John Wick," not merely the well-choreographed gun-fu.
Notes on the debt to "Miami Vice," the treatment of urban space, and stylistic gunplay in Michael Mann's 2004 film…
"Accident" narrates the sexual and professional tensions between an Oxford philosophy professor, his colleague, and his students, in events leading…
The 2016 film "Marauders" is a gunplay and bank robbery story that is not so bad that it's good.