NERVOUS IN THE DESERT: Elizabeth Street alienation in Martin Scorsese’s Casino 

|Ben Tuthill| Casino is the only entry in Martin Scorsese’s catalog you might confuse for self-parody. Three different voice-overs, a United Nations of ethnic slurs, so many Rolling Stones needle drops that at one point there’s a Rolling Stones song playing over another… Continue reading

A Model with No Agency—Believing an Unreliable Narrator in Jerry Schatzberg’s Puzzle of a Downfall Child

|Terry Serres| Lou Andreas Sand (Faye Dunaway) is a former fashion model, retired after a nervous breakdown. Still vain and insecure, we find her holed up in her beachside aerie, where she is interviewed at length by a collaborator from her heyday, the photographer Aaron Reinhardt… Continue reading

Something Else

|Patrick Clifford| It ain’t easy. The stuff of life. The things that continually seem to come with difficulty. Paying rent. Getting along with family. Loving somebody and accepting love in return. No matter how simple we try and keep it, we always complicate it by wondering if there… Continue reading

The Family Stone: How Sharon Stone’s Vision Shaped The Quick and the Dead

|Courtney Kowalke| Writing this piece made me confront the fact that I have a thing for cowboys.Not the lifestyle, not in practice—I hate feeling dusty, straw and most crop pollens make me sneezy, and I’ve been scared of horses since I was ten and one bit my hand while I was feeding it… Continue reading

The Masterpiece that Almost Was: The Quick and the Dead

|Ryan Sanderson| You’re Sharon Stone. Congratulations. You’ve just achieved massive stardom with Basic Instinct. Now Sony’s come knocking with a metatextual riff on Sergio Leone Westerns, the Clint Eastwood Man With No Name archetype written for a woman. You sign on… Continue reading

No Revolution Without Love

|Azra Thakur| Sometimes, I seem to feel a gravity rise from the depths of the ages throughout the world. In myself and in others, I notice a tendency to flee from new problems, to take refuge in churches or counter-churches, to rely on what has been achieved, to be complacent, to… Continue reading

The Propaganda Will See You Now

|MH Rowe| Some documentary films feel more like a document than an act of documentation. They may set out to study this or that topic, but in the end, they seem themselves like objects to study. To put it another way, I am inadequate to judge the regional history and politics presented… Continue reading

Olives to Ashes

|Zach Staads| See this film. If you take nothing else from this, please see this film. There may be things that don’t appeal to a contemporary palette, and it may be considered overly simplistic or overly artistic, depending on who you ask. However, the heart, the soul of… Continue reading

Male Hysteria; or, Fear of Magna Cum Laude Pussy

|Devin Bee| There’s a great gag in the show 30 Rock where we view the world through the eyes of Kenneth, the eternally cheerful and naïve NBC page played by Jack McBrayer. What Kenneth sees is not a world of flesh-and-blood creatures, but one populated entirely by muppets— Continue reading

How to Get Ahead in Advertising and the Great British Special Effects Tradition

|Hannah Baxter| How to Get Ahead in Advertising (1988) has a title reminiscent of a screwball comedy, maybe something starring Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. He’s a staid account executive and she’s a free-spirited graphic designer working at the same advertising agency. Forced to collaborate on a big account… Continue reading