Review: Martin McDonagh’s ‘Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri’
“McDonagh’s film is as much of a message movie as summiting Mount Kilimanjaro is a relaxing family-friendly vacation.”
Despite Needing Tune-Ups, Pixar’s ‘Coco’ Is a Color-Saturated Celebration of Family
“A dance of layered visuals and eye-popping patterns, ‘Coco’ is well balanced with the understated”
Review: Feng Xiaogang’s ‘Youth’
“Achieving a vibrant mix of swooning sincerity and bitter irony, Feng Xiaogang’s ‘Youth’ walks the tightrope of Chinese history with a showman’s flair and a subversive wit, channelling its conflicting perceptions of the past into a single cohesive, ultimately jaded vision.”
Framing the Breakdown: Visual Psychosis in Lucrecia Martel’s ‘The Headless Woman’
“Martel’s film is an absolute masterpiece in visual symbolism and deserves to be seen on that basis alone.”
Review: Joachim Trier’s ‘Thelma’
“It’s an odd little film, more melancholy and plaintive than outright scary or troubling, that slowly crawls under your skin.”
On Ruben Östlund’s Dystopian Realities: ‘Force Majeure’ and ‘The Square’
“Painfully ironic, aggressive and humorously on point, Östlund’s films are timely cinematic pieces that put their characters’ moral compasses at stake.”
Long Live the New Flesh: Bodies, Horrors and Desires in David Cronenberg’s ‘Crash’ and ‘Videodrome’
“In ‘Crash,’ sex feels like a traffic accident. In ‘Videodrome,’ it becomes the subject of a warped, projected fantasy.”
Vincent Price and the Art of Darkness
“He always took the horror genre seriously, and that often meant daring to laugh in the face of the darkest horrors, toeing the line between irony and total seriousness.”
‘Tormenting the Hen’ Director Theodore Collatos on the Use and Misuse of Language
Tanner Tafelski Interviews Theodore Collatos
Devious Dialogues: An Interview with ‘Darkest Hours’ Author Mike Thorn
‘Darkest Hours,’ Genre and Writing: A.M. Stanley Interviews Mike Thorn
Pop Culture as Emotional Self-Defense in ‘Baby Driver’ and ‘The LEGO Batman Movie’
“Observing the dangerous consequences of retreating too far into escapist entertainment, these two films suggest that beneath all this cultural noise is the unacknowledged truth that the most fervent of music nerds and fanboys may indeed be ‘scared as shit.’”
War and Domestic Violence in Fritz Lang’s ‘Human Desire’
“In ‘Human Desire,’ the train tracks carry its hero into the sunny paradise of the American Dream, not the depths of noir’s endless night.”
Zack Snyder’s ‘Justice League’ Saves the Earth but Not the DC Extended Universe
“The DC Extended Universe is not doomed, but it needs its own clear identity and purpose. Rebranding ‘The Avengers’ is not the answer.”
Review: Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Call Me by Your Name’
“‘Call Me by Your Name’ skips through time like a dream, or a calcified, powerful memory.”
Vague Visages Writers’ Room: Favorite Neo-Noir Films
In the Vague Visages Writers’ Room on Facebook, freelancers were asked to comment about their favorite neo-noir films in celebration of #Noirvember.
Murray Lerner’s ‘Festival’: A Prototype for the Music Documentary
“‘Festival’ challenges our preconceptions about the past – in this case, that of folk music and of music documentaries themselves.”
Vague Visages Is FilmStruck: Jeremy Carr on Erich von Stroheim’s ‘Greed’
“‘Greed’ is like the gold within the soil, a gem that must be mined from its sullied context.”
Cinema of Secrets: An Interview with Philippe Garrel
Julia Yepes Interviews Director Philippe Garrel
The Song of the Cloud-Capped Mountain: Anushka Meenakshi and Iswar Srikumar’s ‘Kho ki pa lü’
“‘Kho ki pa lü’ is about a lot of things, but it’s mostly about music. It is about Li, the songs that people sing when they cultivate rice in small müles.”
The Tattoos Tell the Story: Viggo Mortensen’s Painted Body
“Mortensen uses his body to display his characters’ essential tensions, as they ride the line between truth and lies, loyalty and betrayal, chaos and control.”