Still from Todd Haynes’s May December Fresh off of his time at the Chicago International Film Festival, Chris Forrester shares his thoughts on the films he saw, including buzzy upcoming releases like Palme d’Or winner Anatomy of a Fall and the latest from such filmmakers as Todd Haynes, Hayao Miyazaki, and more. The 59th edition… Read more »
Our first glimpse of Debbie Harry as Nicki in Videodrome Chris Forrester considers the role of Nicki Brand and the icon who plays her, Blondie frontwoman Debbie Harry, in David Cronenberg’s prescient examination of media. “The television screen has become the retina of the mind’s eye.” So says the wonderfully named Professor Brian O’Blivion early… Read more »
A surgeon prepares for a grizzly operation in Brian De Palma’s Sisters Explaining why Sisters is the first true Brian De Palma film and how it set the table for things to come in his career, Chris Forrester delves into the 1972 film’s racial politics, visual language, and, yes, the Alfred Hitchcock of it all…. Read more »
Douglas Sirk melodramas are known for tackling big themes with style and intelligence, and his 1956 Fred MacMurray-Barbara Stanwyck romance is no different, as explained by Establishing Shot‘s newest regular contributor Chris Forrester. In the midst of the exceptional run of films Douglas Sirk directed in the 1950s, and nestled directly between two of his… Read more »
Guest post by Chris Forrester. In The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1996), a lesbian video store clerk seeks out the history of a Black film star from the ’30s as she tries to make a movie of her own. Swoon (Tom Kalin, 1992) retells and relitigates the Leopold and Loeb murder case with a more… Read more »
Guest post by Chris Forrester. “It doesn’t suck,” offers a character at one point in Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls — a tease, or understatement in one way or another, from a film not uncommonly heralded as the worst of all time. In context, it’s a throwaway line of dialogue from the film’s doe-eyed, sharp-witted protagonist; outside… Read more »