Vague Visages Is FilmStruck: Marshall Shaffer on Valentine’s Day and a FilmStruck Wedding
Love Is Love: Peter Putzel Marries FilmStruck
Vague Visages Is FilmStruck: Marshall Shaffer on Agnès Varda’s ‘Mur murs’
“New York might have the physical structure where one can project themselves onto a city, but Los Angeles’ mutability allows people to graft their life into its cultural fabric.”
Could Jordan Peele’s ‘Get Out’ Break Horror’s Dry Spell at the Oscars?
“Art is a product of its time; is it Get Out’s fault that the time mostly resembles a horror production?”
Lady Bird and the War of Innocence
“Maybe this war of innocence is one that’s never really won or lost. Maybe we just take life one battle at a time.”
Bertolt Brecht, Fritz Lang and German Expressionist Fury
“Lang’s film becomes a committed act of social justice advocacy, raging against its enforced limitation, and striving to break the formal apparatus that could often be employed to constrain Classic Hollywood cinema.”
Documenting the Afterlife: Carol Salter’s ‘Almost Heaven’
“Even death can become tedious when one deals with it every day.”
Let the Right Light In: On Escapism, Coping Mechanisms and Master Projections in Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘The Master’
“The processing conversation is perhaps the most telling sequence of all, as Quell submits to The Master — the Master Projection — and acknowledges his own self-deception.”
“Well, Childhood’s Over” – Claiming Adulthood with Some Help from Greta Gerwig
An Essay by Marshall Shaffer
‘Call Me by Your Name’: On Obsession, Growing Up and Falling in Love
An Essay by Ella Kemp
A Retreat into the Self: Introspection and Egoism in Ingmar Bergman’s ‘Wild Strawberries’
“Bergman’s penchant for giving physical form to the conscious and subconscious mind is rarely more apparent than in his 1957 masterpiece ‘Wild Strawberries.’”
The Birds and the Beats: How ‘Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai’ Achieved Ultimate Serenity
“Ghost Dog glides through the story with the swiftness of an avian being in a film that never fails to be cathartic.”
The Bees Won’t Sting: On Celebrity Adoration, Hollywood Misdirection and Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘Boogie Nights’
“At some point, you’ve got to take down the celebrity posters, or at least reassess what they represent.”
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”
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.”
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.”
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.’”
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.”
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.”
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.”