"For Us, By Us, Beyond Us": Barry Jenkins Finds Himself at the Forefront of Contemporary B
When Barry Jenkins presented a PowerPoint to a group of producers outlining his vision for Moonlight (2016), the final slide said the...
Viggo Mortensen: Hollywood's Renaissance Man
If Hollywood had to nominate a Renaissance man, Viggo Mortensen would be at the top of the list. The versatile Danish-American actor is...
Tragedy Strikes Ordinary People in "Manchester by the Sea”
If any film this year has taught us to look beneath the surface, it is Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea. Reeling from an unspoken...
Revisiting Renoir's "The River"
Watching Renoir’s The River (1951), one cannot help but notice its oddly apolitical quality, as the camera seems to glide, like an...
"Run Lola Run": A Byzantine Narrative and A Box Office Hit
For Thomas Elsaesser, what he calls the “mind-game film” is not just about narrative experimentation. Rather, like film noir, it is...
“Singin’ in the Rain" and "Illusions": the Segregated Reality of Film Production
Both Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and "Illusions" (1982) are meta-texts on the technological manipulation behind sound film and...
Jim Jarmusch's Poetry of Post-Modernity
In a review of Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise (1984), New York Times critic, Vincent Canby, commented with ironic admiration that...
“The Breaking Point": Adapting Hemingway’s Critique of Capitalism in "To Have and Have Not
In his chapter on film noir, “The History of an Idea,” James Naremore evokes the numerous literary influences on film noir – not just...
Review: "Film Gris: Crime, Critique, and Cold War Culture in 1951," by Charles Maland
In “Film Gris: Crime, Critique, and Cold War Culture in 1951”, Charles Maland discusses the golden age of film gris in Hollywood cinema,...
"A Streetcar Named Desire": A Seminal Case in Cinema Censorship
A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) is an interesting case study in Studio Era censorship. Despite the painstaking re-editing of the film...
