|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… Continue reading
|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… Continue reading
|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… Continue reading
|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… Continue reading
|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… Continue reading
|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… Continue reading
|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… Continue reading
|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 Continue reading
|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… Continue reading
|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… Continue reading
