Soundtracks of Cinema: ‘Home Team’
‘Home Team’ Soundtrack: A Vague Visages guide for every featured song in Charles Kinnane and Daniel Kinnane’s 2022 Netflix movie.
Sundance Review: Riley Stearns’ ‘Dual’
“While Stearns’ comedy is frequently dark and sardonic, ‘Dual’ is a bit warmer and more spiritual than the average satire, which is surprising given its subject matter.”
Know the Cast: ‘Bruised’
‘Bruised’ Cast: A Vague Visages guide for every main performer and character in Halle Berry’s Netflix movie.
Soundtracks of Cinema: ‘Bruised’
‘Bruised’ Soundtrack: A Vague Visages guide for every featured song in Halle Berry’s Netflix movie.
Know the Cast: ‘King Richard’
‘King Richard’ Cast: A Vague Visages guide for every main performer and character in Reinaldo Marcus Green’s 2021 movie.
Soundtracks of Cinema: ‘King Richard’
‘King Richard’ Soundtrack: A Vague Visages guide for every featured song in Reinaldo Marcus Green’s 2021 movie.
Malice at the Palace: Where Is Ron Artest Now
What happened to Ron Artest after the events shown in ‘Untold: Malice at the Palace’? This free-to-read article provides an update on the Netflix documentary subject.
Mannhunting: Exploring Masculinity in the Films of Michael Mann – Part Three
Mannhunting #3 by Bill Bria (‘Ali,’ ‘The Insider’ and ‘Collateral’)
Mannhunting: Exploring Masculinity in the Films of Michael Mann – Part One
Mannhunting #1 by Bill Bria: “The protagonists and antagonists in Mann’s films tend to be mirror images of each other, all of them caught within masculinity’s shackles.”
Fantasia 2020 Review: David Darg and Price James’ ‘You Cannot Kill David Arquette’
“‘You Cannot Kill David Arquette’ is an incredibly moving and life-affirming lesson in following your dreams at all costs.”
The Code Complex: Robert De Niro, Jake LaMotta and ‘Raging Bull’
“‘Raging Bull’ — a complex character study about methods and codes of conduct — all too often gets reductively tagged as Scorsese’s toxic masculinity sports movie that allowed De Niro to lose (and gain) weight in pursuit of an Oscar.”
TIFF 2019 Review: On the Spiritual Strivings of Trey Edward Shults’ ‘Waves’
“For a story that engages with tough, thorny questions of redemption and reconciliation, it’s a welcome development to have a filmmaker look upwards, not inwards.”
Crossover After Crossover: The Layered Discussions in ‘High Flying Bird’
“While ‘High Flying Bird’ may seem uneven at first glance, one has to appreciate that Soderbergh directly addresses controversial societal topics that always touch a nerve in America.”
Fight Like a Man: ‘Rocky V’ and ‘Rocky Balboa’
“Fathers make sense when we can reduce them to symbols, but the actual business of parenting is so defined by ‘feminine’ qualities — emotional openness, compassion, gentleness, patience — that we often struggle to correlate them with a father figure.”
‘Maiden’ Doc Sails Around the World with Tracy Edwards and Her Crew
“Reflecting and refracting the ongoing conversations around everything from the salary inequity between male and female soccer players to the alleged child sex trafficking hellscape perpetuated by Jeffrey Epstein, ‘Maiden’ can be read as both time capsule and time bomb.”
Fight Like a Man: ‘Rocky IV’
“Looking back at a film like ‘Rocky IV,’ we can’t just say ‘wow, look how dumb we were back then’ because the simple truth is that we haven’t earned the right. We are still making the same mistakes, still falling for the same macho con.”
Why We Look Up: Traveling Space and Time in ‘Apollo 11’ and ‘Minding the Gap’
“Through film, people can step outside the bounds of space and time to revisit the past, to see something old from a new vantage point.”
Backlash: A Decade of John G. Avildsen
“Some of Avildsen’s men turn to violence. Some of them turn to crime. Some of them turn inward. All of them know that somehow, some way, they must turn. They cannot survive, let alone win, without surrendering some part of themselves.”
Vague Visages Is FilmStruck: Steve James’ ‘Hoop Dreams’
“As much as ‘Hoop Dreams’ concerns the sports-centric plight of William and Arthur, it is perhaps even more significantly an illustrative case study of what perpetually imperils men (and women) of a certain social, economic and racial constitution.”