The Immanent Transcendence in Mascha Schilinski’s ‘Sound of Falling’
Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling operates in the language of the unconscious, which is the language of the dead. The viewer must invite the dead into each present moment.
Film Feature
The Beatles ‘Magical Mystery Tour’: Best Band, Worst Movie
The Beatles’ disaster of a pop musical, quirky, farce, road trip fantasy film that became Magical Mystery Tour begins with triumph.
Gen X’s Death By the Point of the Stiletto
David Frankel’s satire The Devil Wears Prada rendered Gen X’s smarter-than-everyone, holier-than-thou attitude of perpetual disaffection obsolete.
Satire Is No Longer Critical; It’s Inspirational
Satire meant to critique corporate greed and the dark side of masculinity has instead inspired a new kind of performance identity.
What Upholds Kokuho’s Mystique?
Highly praised, to a sycophantic degree, one might argue, Sang-il Lee’s lengthy drama, Kokuho, fails the artfulness of its subject.
Teo Hernández’s Queer Avant-Garde Films Rewire Your Brain
Watching Teo Hernández’s queer avant-garde films, the source for his ideas about cinema as sex and ritual, all culminating in ecstatic visions, becomes self-evident.
Vampires and the Ecstasy of Consumer Submission
Vampires once symbolized aristocratic tyranny, but now mirror decadent late-capitalist enthrallment. Our ecstasy of submission – to the vampire, the corporation, the franchise reboot, the Kickstarter campaign – offers relief from the heavy burden of autonomy.
Kinuyo Tanaka’s Films About Women in Japan’s Evolving Postwar Society
Kinuyo Tanaka remains more famous for acting in other directors’ films, but Kinuyo Tanaka Directs demonstrates her command of the qualities needed to marshal major productions under her own baton
Caroline Strubbe’s Trilogy of Forgetting
Director Caroline Strubbe’s “Trying to Forget to Remember” trilogy creates enigmatic space in the viewer’s head, or in the space between our heads and the spaces on screen.
Chile Under Pinochet: A Film Chronology of Dictatorship and Memory
From the 1973 coup to its afterlives in national memory, these films trace violence, silence, resistance, and the ways Chile continues to confront Pinochet’s violent legacy.
‘Esta Isla’ (‘This Island’) Contains Multitudes
From its opening title, Esta Isla (This Island) embraces the complexity and contradictions of Fredric Jameson’s formulation of “third-world” society and Puerto Rico’s unique situation.
Michael Jackson Sequin-ized
The world conjured by Antoine Fuqua’s Michael Jackson movie is an emotionally flattened realm of veneration and idolisation that would make even Stalin blush.