Local Heroes: Ben Flanagan on Odeon Chelmsford
“Local Heroes” is a Vague Visages column dedicated to movie theater memories and the theatrical experience.
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.”
Martin Scorsese, ‘Mean Streets’ and Caravaggio’s Moment of Illumination
“In Caravaggio and Scorsese’s art, the silent actions of male and female characters speak louder than words. We don’t need to hear Holofernes scream to understand what Judith has taken.”
Album Review: Phoebe Bridgers ‘Punisher’
“Bridgers, like all her millennial contemporaries, contains multitudes as yet unseen. She is living any number of lives all at once — but, at the core of it all, there’s still a vulnerable child of the 90s adrift in a merciless world…”
Tearing Down the Monument: Sean Connery’s 1970s
“In my hatred for the Bond franchise, I feel I may have done a disservice to its star. I have always had a tendency to discount Sean Connery as an exquisitely sculpted statue, capable of filling out a tuxedo very nicely but little else.”
Collecting Movies with Brady Daley
Greg Carlson Interviews Brady Daley About Movie Collecting
World Cinema Project: Behind Closed Doors – ‘The Housemaid’ and ‘Insiang’
“One of the great joys in viewing the films amassed under the World Cinema Project banner is discovering the richness of a nation’s cultural and scenic backdrop.”
Album Review: Jehnny Beth ‘To Love Is to Live’
“Unafraid of what makes her difficult, idiosyncratic or complex, Jehnny Beth ties a bow on this project with an impressive clarity that serves to reinforce her already-established and considerable talents while boldly traversing new, untested, innately personal ground with aplomb.”
12 Angry Films: Sidney Lumet on Justice #12 – ‘Find Me Guilty’
“The accumulated effect of ‘Find Me Guilty,’ with its litany of absurdities, is that it is better to deliver the accused from continued subjugation than to maintain faith in a system that has lost all claim to its moral authority.”
Interview: Jeremy Gardner, Christian Stella and Justin Benson on ‘After Midnight’
Leslie Hatton Interviews ‘After Midnight’ Filmmakers Jeremy Gardner, Christian Stella and Justin Benson
The Disaster Area: From ‘Airport’ to ‘Airplane!’ – Part Three
Part Three of a Four-Part Disaster Movie Series by Bill Bria
Album Review: Run the Jewels ‘RTJ4’
“The verbal gymnastics and musical dynamism on display serve as an exacting call to attention, turning listeners’ eyes and ears onto a reality long disregarded by the privileged.”
Why Criticism: Nichols / Soderbergh
“In their conversations, Soderbergh and Nichols work together to dismantle the artificial dividing line between art and criticism, neatly moving between the two…”
Emir Kusturica’s ‘Underground’: 25 Years Later
“‘Underground’ remains a controversial and wildly ambitious film, one that refuses to be pinned down. It’s a never-ending hall of mirrors that reveals more about the audience than the narrative itself.”
Album Review: The 1975 ‘Notes on a Conditional Form’
“By the end, ‘Notes on a Conditional Form’ reveals itself to be about very little — too incoherent to justify its length and too scattershot to feel like a unified whole.”
Not the End: Celebrating the Directing Career of John Cassavetes
“Cassavetes’ films form a mosaic of artistic fortitude, glued together with thought.”
Jonathan Kiefer on ‘Around the Sun’ and the Plurality of Unknowns
Yoana Pavlova Interviews ‘Around the Sun’ Screenwriter Jonathan Kiefer
Album Review: Hayley Williams ‘Petals for Armor’
“Although ‘Petals for Armor’ continually returns to a well of torment and reflection, there is a sense of reinvigorated purpose and direction at play in both Williams’ words and her aesthetic choices.”
Why Criticism: Brian De Palma and Film as Film Criticism
“If the point of criticism is to bring the reader closer to the artwork, then Schrader’s reviews of other films are as important as his own to understanding his perspective.”
‘The Psychic,’ ‘The Black Cat’ and the Concept of the ‘Final Girl’
“Even though ‘The Psychic’ and ‘The Black Cat’ don’t exist as prominently in the cultural consciousness as ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ and ‘Halloween,’ there is a sense that the Final Girls do exist in the wider world of horror…”