By Dan DeWeese
Solaris, genre, and the problems of loving simulacra.
All in Film
The Invention of Marienbad
By Dan DeWeese
Is every art film science fiction?
The Monster in Your Head
By Dan DeWeese
Forbidden Planet diagnoses the movies.
Sex Slaves
By Dan DeWeese
Before space, there was obsession.
Méliès and the Limits
By Dan DeWeese
Taking A Trip to the Moon.
NeoCop
By Danny O’Brien
RoboCop and the failure of satire.
Jaws on the Beach
By Leslie Doyle
A shark, a whale, and men who chase them via “dead reckoning.”
Blade Runner Now Watches Us From the Past
By Dan DeWeese
In Blade Runner, eyes reveal the plot is not the story.
What is Illuminated and What is Shadowed
By Benjamin Craig
Emily Dickinson, salvation, and The Lighthouse.
Patron Saint of Restraint
By Wendy Bourgeois
Doris Day mastered the arcane guidelines and strictures of pre-pill femininity.
To Be Human and Get Away With It
By Rachel Greben
Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow is built as a fairy tale: the daughter, Sofia Scicolone, journeys far from home to achieve her calling as Sophia Loren, but the road home is treacherous.
The Government is a Computer
By Connor Jones
In Alphaville, Jean-Luc Godard turned a 1960 computer into a disorienting vision of the future.
Ultraman
By Alex Behr
The only ways in which my girlfriends liked sci-fi were if they could boyfriend the main character: Kirk; Spock—what was the option in Ultraman?
Film It Slant
By Dan DeWeese
No man appears heroic in a Dutch angle.
In Praise of Ordinary Art
By Matt Hartman
If the essential challenge of criticism is to get others to see what you see in an object, the challenge today is to resist the critical landscape that shapes how we approach art in the first place.
They Can’t Touch Us
By Marlena Williams
Beneath its surface, The Entity is a film about sexual violence and the ways in which society silences the women who experience it, while keeping the men who perpetuate it hidden from view.
Who was Barbara Loden?
By Kate McCourt
”Wanda must rank as that cinematic rarity, a movie that really does get better—much better—as it goes along,” Roger Greenspun stated in his 1971 Times review of Barbara Loden’s first feature film as director. The film stands today as Loden’s sole produced work of feature-length writing, directing, and lead acting—she died of cancer at the age of forty-eight, nine years after Wanda’s release.
We Have Seen the Enemy, and It Is Television
By Tevis Eurythmic
Cinema hates television. In The Theory of the Novel, Georg Lukacs posits that there are true novels and fake novels—books labeled “a novel” that are really just narratives created to move mass units of recycled stereotypes and tired tropes. Visual depictions of small screens inside cinematic worlds in the 1970s and 1980s suggest cinema felt the same about television: that the “idiot box” is a fraudulent, socially corrosive form of visual storytelling—a cheap, fake version of cinema.
Nobody's Hero
By Dan DeWeese
Blow-Up is more relevant now than it was in 1966.
She Selected Herself
By Dan DeWeese
Citizenfour’s cinematic ancestors are not documentaries. Fahrenheit 451 is not about books. The current definition of “secret” appears to be “something everyone already knows and tolerates.”