|Doug Carmoody| The patriotic imperative to “support the troops” grew, like many other national neuroses, from America’s inability to reckon with the moral failures of the Vietnam War. To counter anti-war sentiment, the U.S. political establishment boosted effusive parades to “Support… Continue reading
|Andrew Neill| 17 years ago, on a frigid night in January 2008, I was in a car packed with friends, speeding up I-29 from Fargo to Grand Forks to see a new release. We would have gone to see it locally, but the theater chain (Marcus) and the distributor (Paramount) were fighting. The film… Continue reading
|J.R. Jones| If you’re sensitive to microaggressions, brace yourself for the macroaggression of The Intruder. This low-budget 1962 drama, about a small Southern town struggling to integrate its public high school, plunges viewers into the sort of casual white supremacism… Continue reading
|Sophie Durbin| I have a strict “don’t talk about people from your past in your writing, they didn’t sign up for that” policy, but I am going to break it to share that I had an ex tell me (I was an admittedly overzealous linguistics minor in college at the time) that the concept of preserving… Continue reading
|Phil Kolas| An ensemble masterpiece, where one dozen of the worst and most violent incarcerated American soldiers are offered a suicide mission in exchange for their freedom. A rotten deal from a rotten wartime government, offered to rotten men, to get them to kill the only type… Continue reading
|Finn Odum| Sometime Before 1944: The US military established a covert demolition squad that later took on the moniker “The Filthy Thirteen,” after they decided to save their bathing water for cooking. Normandy, France, 1944: The Filthy Thirteen were airdropped over the Douve River… Continue reading
|Ryan Sanderson| The Last Detail is a film of contrasts. It’s a film about everything, in which almost nothing happens—a beautiful, very funny work of art composed of some of the ugliest, most depressing imagery you’ll ever see in a major studio film. It’s an improvisational-feeling actor’s showcase… Continue reading
|Jackson Stern| We like to imagine that, when faced with prospects of injustice, repression, and hypocrisy from those in the highest of towers, we’d stand tall and together. We’d overthrow our oppressors by bashing them or, better yet, outsmarting them at their own cruel game… Continue reading
|John Costello| Although All Through the Night is primarily a comedy about small-time New York racketeers who become entangled in a spy ring working for the Nazi regime, the slapstick characters take moral positions for community, empathy, and democracy. The movie gives insights… Continue reading
|Dan Howard| Adventure. Excitement. A jedi may crave not these things, but a former Ewok-turned-sorcerer just might. After Return of the Jedi delivered a triumphant finale to the Star Wars trilogy in 1983, George Lucas was not only focusing on a prequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark… Continue reading
