|Ryan Sanderson| Fires on the Plain begins with a literal slap to the face. Cruel, jarring, and just a little bit funny. That’s the energy Kon Ichikawa maintains throughout his bleak and disturbing masterpiece which feels like a cross between Apocalypse Now and Bambi. If a film before 1960 captured Continue reading
|Malcolm Cooke| Claire Denis moved to Cameroon, the setting of Chocolat, when she was only two months old.1 With a colonial administrator father, she had an itinerant childhood driven by her father’s passion for geography,2 growing up across Burkina Faso, Somalia, and Senegal in… Continue reading
|Lucas Vonasek| Fascism can take many forms. Throughout books and movies, it is often portrayed as overt and obvious villainy where injustice drips from the pronounced canines of the antagonist. Other times, fascism can be seen as a devilishly debonair individual smoothly… Continue reading
|Matthew Christensen| “News Item” Men seldom make passes At girls who wear glasses. -Dorothy Parker Let me start off by saying that I never fully understood Scottie Ferguson’s obsession with Madeleine Elster in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. I mean, I get why he falls for her. Kim Novak—playing the part in perfectly coiffed white-blonde hair… Continue reading
|Allison Vincent| I do not identify as a time travel girly. Movies where the laws of time and space are bent need strong foundations for me to enjoy them, otherwise I find myself inundated with intrusive thoughts about logic, the “rules of the universe” (those generated by the… Continue reading
|Jackson Stern| Claire Denis has always made monster movies. Or, at least, movies with monsters in them or, most commonly, movies about the survivors of monsters. Most of her films revolve around (or feature in a capacity) people who have intense sense of dread permeating… Continue reading
|Hannah Baxter| In a world where every other movie ends with a blowout fight between gods, superheroes, or both, with nothing less than the fate of the universe hanging in the balance, isn’t it refreshing when you come across a film that knows how to contain itself? Passenger 57 (1992) Continue reading
|Jake Rudegeair| It’s DIE HARD on a plane (or a boat, a bus, a mountain, etc.). This is the Mad-Libs elevator pitch that launched a thousand films (ooh, DIE HARD on an elevator? I guess DIE HARD had elevators, never mind). Of the “DIE HARD on a …” Continue reading
|Azra Thakur| Claire Denis sets the tone of her second feature film, No Fear, No Die (1990) from the start: in the middle of night a young Isaach de Bankolé and Alex Descas are at the forefront of establishing their lives in Paris. De Bankolé is reflecting on a passage from a book, whispering… Continue reading
|Courtney Kowalke| Recently, I’ve been getting into jazz. This exploration is born of necessity: I work third shifts. I want to listen to music on the job, so I need workplace-appropriate tunes. I also get annoyed by incessant ad breaks, overly chatty DJs, and radio stations… Continue reading
