Neorealism Under Martial Law in Lino Brocka’s Manila in the Claws of Light
Tragic, Gothic, and Domestic: Classical Horror in Kim Jee-woon’s A Tale of Two Sisters
Gender Bias and the Horror Film That Was Eaten by Disney: Zach Cregger’s Barbarian
Neorealism Under Martial Law in Lino Brocka’s Manila in the Claws of Light
|Andrea Buiser| Lino Brocka was born in the province of Sorsogon in 1939, in what was then an unincorporated territory and commonwealth of the United States that existed from 1935 to 1946. Growing up in a setting that shaped his understanding of social inequality, Brocka’s early life...
Tragic, Gothic, and Domestic: Classical Horror in Kim Jee-woon’s A Tale of Two Sisters
|Chris Polley| For many who have endured a ninth grade and/or AP literature class, Shakespeare brings to mind big emotions and melodramatic ideas: forbidden romance, corrupt monarchs, or mistaken identity. An underrated aspect of a good chunk of his work, however, is its exploration of the horrors of the great beyond...
Gender Bias and the Horror Film That Was Eaten by Disney: Zach Cregger’s Barbarian
|Penny Folger| “Your movie is like the Jaws of Airbnbs,” jokes Korey Coleman, host of the Double Toasted podcast to writer/ director Zach Cregger for whom Barbarian, in 2022, was his solo feature debut. For those who don’t remember the cultural impact of that record-breaking 1975...
Trailers from Heaven: How Barbarian’s Advance Publicity Made a Good Film Better
|Jay Ditzer| Half the fun (well, maybe a quarter of the fun) of going to the movies is the trailers shown before the main event. Do I want to see—or avoid—a new release? Well-made trailers are almost like tiny little movies themselves, and indeed, there’s an art to making a good trailer. The first rule of good trailers is ...
Diabolical Vilification & the Transformative Power of Xenophobia in The Wailing (곡성군): An Outsider’s Perspective
|Chris Ryba-Tures| When my parents first met, my dad was a Jesuit priest and my mom was studying to be a Catholic nun. While I may have started life as a “Child of the Cloth” I’ve since become an outsider to the Catholic Church. Still, I’m Culturally Catholic (which my wife insists is “not a thing”). ...
The Terror of Timelessness: Screens and Screams in David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows
|Chris Polley| I was lucky enough to see David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows in the theater when it was originally released a little under 10 years ago today. At a movie theater that no longer exists, playing hooky from work after lunch but before daycare closed, I was already a bit anxious, being a goody two-shoes...
The Searchers: Beautiful to Look at, Tough to Stomach
|Brogan Earney| There’s a lot to admire about The Searchers; the beautiful landscapes, the exhilarating action scenes, the complex characters. It’s all enough to have this film continuously mentioned as one of the greatest ever made, as it should be. The first time I saw the film was just...
It Follows Reimagines Old Rules for Sex and Scares
|Allison Vincent| Like so many, when I first saw It Follows, I found it smart, scary, fresh, dreadful, and fascinating. Part of what initially grabbed my attention was the oft-discussed dream logic of the film. Watching it feels like the same relentless, hyper-focused dreams...
Playing the Fool
|Doug Carmody| Bong Joon-ho’s The Host opens to scenes of tension and tragedy. First, in a politically overt sequence, an American doctor forces a Korean doctor to dump formaldehyde...
The Rose That Lives its Little Hour: The Woman Behind the True Story of The Train
|Courtney Kowalke| We, the makers of this film, wish to pay tribute to those French railway men, living and dead, whose magnificent spirit and whose courage inspired this story. So opens John Frankenheimer’s nail-biter action film The Train (1964). Viewers don’t have to...
Generals and Majors Everywhere
|J.R. Jones| Last spring the New Republic published a theme issue titled “American Fascism: What It Would Look Like,” with a cover image of Der Donald staring bullets at the reader in closely-cropped hair and a Fuhrer mustache. Eight different stories examine how a second Trump presidency...
Seconds: Be Careful What You Wish For
|Bob Aulert| In 1966, Rock Hudson had been a movie star since the early 1950s—by his mere presence, he could generate the financial support to get a movie made AND then get people to buy tickets to see it. John Frankenheimer had parlayed solid network TV jobs like Playhouse 90...
Rock Hudson Deserved Better from Hollywood
|Matt Lambert| In 2013, I was taking my first-ever film studies course. It was a course on Melodramas and our introductory film was the Douglas Sirk, 1956 classic (and a mainstay on my Letterbox Top Four) Written on the Wind. Rock Hudson plays a working-class, intellectual who works for...
Kenji Misumi: Both Lone Wolf and the Cub
|John Moret| The samurai film is, in essence, a very conservative genre in the same realm as the western or horror film. Before you freak out, I don’t mean conservative in terms of politics (though, really…) but in form. The conventional film would witness a ronin finding his honor after losing his way...
A Mother Scorned
|Matthew Christensen| If you are a Gen-Xer like me, your first introduction to Dame Angela Lansbury was probably not through her phenomenal stage career, nor her remarkable film appearances. No, your first introduction to Lansbury was through her work as the pragmatic, somewhere...
Isolation and Family, Arthouse and Hollywood, The Mafia and Jesus: The Impossible Marriages in Martin Scorsese’s Filmography
|Ryan Sanderson| I didn’t fall for Scorsese initially, the same way I did for his contemporaries. Raging Bull left me cold. I hated the characters in Goodfellas too much to really latch on. Make no mistake—I encountered plenty of toxic masculinity in adolescence, just a brand that disguised...
Killer Smile
|MH Rowe| Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust (1939), which like Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays (1970) is a classically bleak “Hollywood novel,” ends as Didion’s later story never could: with a riot. No one could riot in Play It as It Lays. Although it is set in the unruly 1960s the violence of...
The Chic Nothingness of Play it As It Lays
|Sophie Durbin| The unexpected thread that I chased for Play It As It Lays was a comment a family friend made when she saw me doing my due diligence by reading Joan Didion’s novel of the same name. “Oh, that’s a good book,” she said...
Pretty Poison: An Anti-Lolita for the Post-Code Era
|Sophie Durbin| Let me set a scene for you. In a quaint little town in mid-century America, an emotionally stunted man with a suspicious past becomes fixated on a lovely young girl. In an attempt to incorporate her into an insidious plot, he whisks her away, lying about his identity and his intentions...
Sam Mendes at War
|Hannah Baxter| 1917 (2019) was not the first project on which director Sam Mendes collaborated with cinematographer Roger Deakins.1 It’s not even the first war story they made together: that would be Jarhead (2005), a film that makes an interesting counterpoint to 1917. The latter film...
1917 and the Pitfalls of One-Shot and Long-Shot Filmmaking
|Nicole Rojas-Oltmann| You may have noticed the influx of one-shot and long-shot films in the past two decades. We have camera technology to thank for this. Now film can be made in one go. You know, like theatre has always been done. One-shot and long-shot cinematography pose...
This Just In: Audience Manipulation in Johnnie To’s Breaking News
|Benjamin Jarman| “Image matters most. We have to put on a great show. An eye for an eye. This is the age of the media. The media got us. Now we get back at them.” These are the first lines of dialogue recited by actress Kelly Chen in Johnnie To’s 2004 crime film, Breaking News. Chen
Slacker Noir
|Hannah Baxter| The Watermelon Woman (1996) is a movie about making a movie about movies—the very definition of meta. The main character, Cheryl, played by writer-director Cheryl Dunye, is steeped in moving pictures. She supports herself videotaping weddings and working...
Humanity and Stolen Choice in Children of Men
|Matt Lambert| By the time Children of Men plays at the Trylon, my son might be born. It will be my wife and I's first child. It's something we've waffled on in our marriage for many years. The decision to bring life into the world has changed drastically as I've grown older. When I was younger, I thought the idea of...