From the first frames of the film, Josephine Decker’s 2014 feature Thou Wast Mild and Lovely merges violence and play. Sarah (Sophie Traub) chases her father Jeremiah (Robert Longstreet) across the lawn, jabbing him with a decapitated hen. They giggle and run at each other, getting blood on their clothes. When they’re done playing, the handheld… Read more »
Guest post by Imari Walker. “If I have work, then I’m not going to die, cause work is a living spirit in me — that which wants to connect with other people and pass on something, something to them which they can use in their own lives and grow from.” Marlon Riggs — filmmaker, poet,… Read more »
Guest post by Dayna Thompson. In the film Robot & Frank, the titular character, who is living with dementia, is forced to take in a “caregiving robot” his children purchase for him. He isn’t happy about it. Frank doesn’t see himself as needing this type of help. He doesn’t want to sit around and be… Read more »
In Jonathan Rosenbaum’s definitive 2002 text on the Ukrainian filmmaker Alexander Dovzhenko, he persuasively argues that Dovzhenko’s cinema represents a form of “heroic portraiture” more than it does a vehicle for storytelling or narrative expression. Comparing Dovzhenko’s work with a more contemporary film by Jean-Marie Straub, Rosenbaum writes that “[Straub’s film] qualifies as heroic portraiture… Read more »
In the decadent French chateau of a frisky aristocrat and his wandering wife, a showgirl pretending to be a baroness and the cab driver she fell for are arguing about the practicality of a marriage surviving on 40 francs a day. “I know we’re right for each other,” he coos. “I know it deep down… Read more »
When I grow up, I want to be Jessica Fletcher. That’s the thought I have every time I put on an episode of Murder, She Wrote, the cozy murder-mystery series starring the inimitable, incomparable Angela Lansbury, who we lost on October 11. I have innumerable favorite Lansbury performances, as so many of us do —… Read more »