Sometimes, movies are released at exactly the right time, gaining impact and resonance thanks to events in the offscreen world.
Stanley Nelson’s new documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution is accomplished and compelling, if not particularly daring in any way aesthetically.
“I guess I wasn’t built for this.”
“Nobody was. It’s all just a trick we perform, when we’d rather not die immediately.”
Stanley Kubrick’s first feature Fear and Desire – famously considered lost for years, and famously dismissed by Kubrick himself as “a bumbling amateur film exercise” – is an existentialist war movie.
Many horror movies are about external dangers coming to get you – monsters, demons, Dex Dogtective. But many are about the latent terror that was already there. Jennifer Kent’s brilliant, unsettling The Babadook is a recent example of the second sort.
Part of an ongoing effort to watch a set of films from non-White, non-U.S., non-male, and/or non-straight filmmakers and depart a little from the Western canon. The intro and full list can be found here.
“Every race man and woman should cast aside their skepticism regarding the Negro’s ability as a motion picture star.”
Part of an ongoing effort to watch a set of films from non-White, non-U.S., non-male, and/or non-straight filmmakers and depart a little from the Western canon. The intro and full list can be found here.
What if The Birth of a Nation, D W Griffith’s groundbreaking and deeply nasty epic, had been made by Black people in the U.S.,
When I first decided to embark on a quest to watch each of the films in Roger Ebert’s Great Movies series, I couldn’t help noticing that the list of familiar names and titles excluded vast parts of the filmmaking and -watching world.
Part of an ongoing effort to watch each of the films in Roger Ebert’s Great Movies series. The introduction and full list can be found here.
For the first time in this series, my viewing of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari marks a return to familiar material rather than a first showing.