Category Archives: Reviews

Socialism on Film (SOF) is a remarkable project, detailing the history of the most important political, philosophical, and economic movement of the last one hundred and fifty years, and its reflection on the cinema. An undertaking quite clearly years in … Continue reading →

Making A Dog’s Purpose into a movie probably sounded like a really good idea on paper. After all, the novel (originally written by W. Bruce Cameron in 2010) was a #1 New York Times bestseller, selling over 2.5 million copies … Continue reading →

In Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare writes: “Everyone can master a grief but he who has it.”  This summarizes the plot of Heather de Michelle’s film As Good as You (2015).  The audience watches the protagonist Jo (Laura Heisler) attempt … Continue reading →

In a recent Fresh Air interview with Alec Baldwin, Terry Gross welcomed the fifty-nine-year-old star, “First things first, congrats on The Boss Baby.” I couldn’t help but laugh at this opening — a title like The Boss Baby (2017) solicits … Continue reading →

Melis Behlil, associate professor at Kadir Has University in Istanbul, takes it upon herself to interrogate the definition of Hollywood, with the perspective and focus on global directors in the twentieth century: “If it was difficult to define Hollywood in … Continue reading →

Death by Hanging Criterion Blu-ray Review from Liza Palmer Contributors: Lizzie Bankowski, Tayler Camplin, Chandler Mackenzie Comes, Michael Edwards Jr., Kenneth L. Freyer, Bobby Hartman, Claire Kalb, Megan Kiss, Jeremy Meyers, Kimberly Mariah Smallwood, Chamberlain Staub, Stephanie L. Triplett, Emmett Williams, and Kelli Wofford.

If mainstream cinema is upheld to the task of democratically representing its viewers then it often fails. So when a film comes out that depicts marginalized figures it’s passed under the kind of scrutiny that a lot of other films … Continue reading →

The five-part documentary series Agnes Varda: From Here to There, directed by the resolute Agnes Varda and released by Cinema Guild, follows the filmmaker as she traverses the globe, meeting with friends, filmmakers (including Chris Marker and Manoel de Oliveira), … Continue reading →

Through the rich collection that is Jonas Mekas’s Movie Journal: The Rise of the New American Cinema, 1959-1971 (2016), the reader is presented with the collected writings of Mekas as they were sketched upon the pages of his Village Voice … Continue reading →

Captain Fantastic (Ross, 2016) imagines an intellectual experiment in child-rearing. In it, Ben Cash (Viggo Mortensen) and his wife, Leslie (Trin Miller), have decided to raise their spawn in a remote area of the Pacific Northwest. We enter the story … Continue reading →