|J.R Jones| Don Hertzfeldt’s characters have always struggled for words. In the opening scene of his hourlong animation It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2012), the everyman protagonist, Bill, recognizes someone walking toward him on the street and prepares a greeting. But when they pass… Continue reading
|Matthew Christensen| As a kid, we used to play a game called “Statue Maker.” The statue maker would swing two or three kids about; they had to hold the pose they landed in and come up with some character to portray. Other children would play customers, guided about by the statue… Continue reading
|Natalie Marlin| In the dawning hours of the morning, a grocer (Bengal) wakes to the still-blue fading night. The framing is methodical, delicate, but not at all static. The grocer Haruzo’s body stirs from bed, but the camera lingers on his wife Michi (Masako Motai) stirring and rolling… Continue reading
|Nicole Rojas-Oltmanns| Unlike coconuts, mangoes, apples, cherimoyas, plantains, and pineapples, everyone knows what to do with a watermelon. Cut and enjoy. They grow in the vast majority of the world from Sweden to Japan, USA to Chile, China to Israel. Perhaps, because of this, watermelons … Continue reading
|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… Continue reading
|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… Continue reading
|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… Continue reading
|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… Continue reading
|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… Continue reading
|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… Continue reading
