‘Amrum’ Presents Wartime Distress with Visual Grace
Fatih Akin’s visually beautiful wartime drama, Amrum, turns a child’s survival into a memory handed from one talented filmmaker to another.
coming-of-age
‘Broken Voices’ Records the Sound of Institutional Abuse
Drawing on the scandal around one of the Czech Republic’s most admired choirs, Broken Voices shows, once again, how institutions meant to exalt can perpetuate abuse.
‘A Man and a Woman’ and a Dizzy 1960s Romance
Claude Lelouch’s hugely popular A Man and a Woman was criticized for its sleek, chic, starstruck, pie-eyed, romantic wish fulfillment. Yet therein lay its radicalism.
Pantheon’s House of High-Tech Mirrors
The post-human speculative sci-fi series Pantheon asks, can humanity recognize itself in its digital reflection?
‘Mosquitoes’ Punkishly Reckons with Motherhood
The vivid depiction of motherhood in Mosquitoes echoes Marguerite Duras’ sentiment; mothers are “the strangest, craziest people we’ve ever met.”
British Identity Interrogated in Three Films
Where Roddam’s Quadrophenia asks of British identity, “Who am I?” and Anderson’s If…. asks “Can I be myself?”, Cammell and Roeg’s Performance declares, “There is no self.”
A Bittersweet Tale of Childhood Innocence, ‘Misunderstood’ Charms
Initially dismissed as a film for children, Misunderstood reveals some mature ideas about childhood and family and would sit better with adult audiences.
Director Mark Pellington on His Timeless Coming-of-Age Debut ‘Going All the Way’
Still courtesy of Oscilloscope
Eating Boys and Growing Tails: “Menstruosity” Body Horror in Film
In coming-of-age, “menstruosity” body horror films, the Final Girl is the sexual transgressor. As her sexual freedom grows, so does her monstrosity.
What’s So Great About Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘Licorice Pizza’?
Gary of Licorice Pizza behaves like all male characters from Paul Thomas Anderson’s gallery of sociopaths, except now the type is cast as a romantic hero.
Smoking Saved My Life: A Skinny Jewish Kid Comes of Age in the Haze of American Violence
As cool as Marlon Brando, James Dean, Jack Kerouac or Dalton Trumbo, rebel Max "Flaco" Greenbaum grows up in Watts Riots-Vietnam-draft-era L.A. Too smart (and smart-mouthed) for school, the violence of this world is drawn in deep and lingers like the long, slow, life-saving drag of a cigarette.