A Phenomenology of the East Coast: Sidney Lumet’s The Verdict

|MH Rowe| As quiet and downbeat as it is—as suspicious of institutional authority as it is—The Verdict (1982) is not quite the post-Watergate courtroom drama it appears to be. It traffics instead in a variety of chastened heroism, the kind that comes from finding out that… Continue reading

Down the Yellow Brick Road and Through the Looking Glass: How Zardoz Was Colored by its Era and Reflects Back on Today

|Zach Staads| So, the civilization we know today is coming to an end and the enlightened intelligentsia want to use the end of the world as a playground for their own disaffected experiments and whims as they figure out immortality and aren’t sure what to do with the cruder… Continue reading

I Have Seen the Future, and It Doesn’t Work: The Off-Kilter, Semi-Genius of Zardoz

|Michael Popham| When people see the movie Zardoz for the first time, they usually walk out of the theater with a lot of questions. Chief among them is, “What the fuck was that all about?” I’ll admit this isn’t a movie for everyone. But hear me out: Zardoz is not just a perfect example of 1970s… Continue reading

Pain, Pleasure, and Depiction of Manipulation in The Night Porter

|Matt Lambert| Too often in criticism, there is a lens from the future looking back at the past in judgement. To be clear, I’m struggling with that urge in reviewing The Night Porter. The 1974 film directed by Liliana Cavani examines the sadomasochistic relationship… Continue reading

This Just In: Evil is STILL Banal

|Veda Lawrence| For someone whose exposure to Holocaust literature has come mostly from the diary of Anne Frank, or the Boy in the Striped Pajamas, or even Life is Beautiful, a film like The Night Porter stands as a stark and offensive antithesis to the almost sanitized narratives that… Continue reading