Recent DVDs Features

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Monday, March 2 2009

John Cassavetes’ Faces: The Authenticity of Discomfort

By Chadwick Jenkins

The camera always gets too close in Cassavetes’ films. These aren’t close-ups; they are invasions of private space.

Monday, February 23 2009

100 Essential Female Film Performances

By PopMatters Staff

PopMatters concludes our 100 Best Female Film Performances feature with extremely insightful, generous anecdotes from Liv Ullmann about three of the performances on this list, one of her personal choices, and a once-in-a-lifetime addendum by the glorious Bergman super trouper Bibi Andersson herself.

Tuesday, February 3 2009

Rossellini and the Filter of Neo-Realism

By Chadwick Jenkins

These films flaunt their artifice and yet there are moments when something else emerges -- some rarefied emotion that we connect to reality.

Monday, February 2 2009

The New Golden Age of British TV Comedy

By Evan Sawdey

Every once in awhile, Britain rules over America. The Office, Spaced, Coupling and other British shows are gradually narrowing the Atlantic-sized gap between the United States and England.

Friday, January 16 2009

PopMatters Picks: The Best TV, Film, and DVD of 2008

By PopMatters Staff

PopMatters concludes our week-long special highlighting the best TV, film and DVD of the past year with the 30 Best Films of 2008 and Best Complexities in 2008.

Thursday, December 4 2008

Rambo: In All His Glory

By Marco Lanzagorta

Rambo is constantly portrayed as judge, jury, and executioner in the national and international spheres.

Tuesday, November 25 2008

The ‘Murderous’ Art of George Baselitz

By Chadwick Jenkins

For Baselitz, the true artist is the eternal outsider. While he leads a good bourgeois family life, at his art he becomes a murderer, a man on the fringes of good society, a destroyer.

Thursday, November 13 2008

Unchartered Territory: The Making of an Icon in The James Stewart Western Collection

By Matthew Sorrento

As he headed westward in his films, a new, darker Jimmy Stewart helped redefine a genre.

Wednesday, November 12 2008

The Signal and the Violence of American Identity Politics

By Timothy Gabriele

The oppressor in The Signal is an underlying, parental figure in absentia. It is industrial civilization as pathology, inextricably and somehow willfully divorced from reality.

Tuesday, November 11 2008

“To Be Happy in Your Own Life is All You Can Do”: An Interview with Wayne Coyne

By Drew Fortune

It laboured for years in production, all while its lead actor was at the height of his drug addiction and the press grew wary of its many delays. Finally, the Flaming Lips' full-length film Christmas on Mars is seeing the light of day, and Wayne Coyne couldn't be happier to talk about it.

Wednesday, October 15 2008

Bruce Nauman and The Art of Thinking

By Chadwick Jenkins

In Bruce Nauman's art no complacency is allowed to reside. The complacent can only flee.

Cinema Qua Non - Indispensable DVDs

By PopMatters Staff

What if you were asked to narrow your notions of good and great down to one… single… item? A sole symbol of who you are. PopMatters staffers pick one indispensable DVD, and the 30 responses echo something very private and personal about the writers answering.

Friday, September 26 2008

The Detective & His Reflections: The Shield: Sixth Season

By Quentin B. Huff

The nihilistic, morally blurred world of The Shield reflects the inner workings of its characters.

Friday, August 29 2008

The Invaders: Cold War Central with the Vietnam Blues

By Michael Barrett

The aliens carry silver dollars with lights which function both as cell phones and as gadgets that can make anyone drop dead from an instantly diagnosable "brain hemorrhage".

Friday, August 22 2008

Yukio Mishima, of Love and Death

By Matt Mazur

Death and sex were verboten, and Mishima took it upon himself to be a virtuosic provocateur; part passionate expressive modernist, part fervent traditionalist.

Wednesday, August 20 2008

Brighton Wok: The Legend of Ganja Boxing

By George Tiller

Brighton Wok is England’s first marijuana Kung-Fu movie. You get the bong, I’ll get the nachos.

Thursday, August 14 2008

A Fairy Tale Childhood: An Interview with Guy Maddin

By Robert Loerzel

The Canadian cult director talks to PopMatters about family, childhood, memory and his cinematic Gesamptkunstwerks that often look like damaged artifacts dredged up from an archive of lost 1920s and '30s film.

Life Into Art: Strange Culture and the Measure of Documentary Film

By Shaun Huston

Strange Culture is a critical entry point into the current discussion of what makes a documentary a documentary, most notably because it announces its own subjectivity in a clear and provocative way.

Thursday, June 19 2008

The Technology of the Occult: Méliès and the Invention of Film

By Chadwick Jenkins

Like any illusionist, Méliès created wonderment with only the slightest of pretense, creating a filmic language that continues to be explored and exploited today.

Wednesday, June 11 2008

The Phantasmagoric Phantom Carriage

By Marco Lanzagorta

The Phantom Carriage was truly revolutionary in the way it exploited the unique features of motion pictures, and clearly anticipated the sophisticated narrative and visual structure of modern films.

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