The eyes of a killer: Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver Chris Forrester contemplates a handful of works by Paul Schrader, which reveal a heavy debt to filmmaker Robert Bresson as they excavate the isolation, morality, and violence of their male protagonists. If you’re more than passingly acquainted with the films of Paul Schrader, this… Read more »
Neil Patrick Harris as Colonel Carl Jenkins, Denise Richards as Carmen Ibanez, and Casper Van Dien as Johnny Rico Alex Brannan explains how Starship Troopers, both Robert Heinlein’s book and Paul Verhoeven’s film adaptation, operates in a satiric mode that can make it easy to miss its darker implications. The cover of my copy of… Read more »
Poster for Out of Sight (1998) Alex Brannan, one of our newest regular contributors, considers how Steven Soderbergh uses genre elements to create the eroticism of Out of Sight and this year’s Black Bag. Steven Soderbergh is a director whose long career has involved a fascinating migration across genre boundaries. From a certain angle, his… Read more »
Rey and Luke in The Last Jedi Critically acclaimed yet divisive amongst fans, Rian Johnson’s Star Wars sequel has had a lasting effect on the franchise, as explained by Ben van Welzen, one of our newest regular contributors. “Let the past die. Kill it if you have to.” These words, spoken by antagonist Kylo Ren… Read more »
A grave use of technology in The Shrouds Chris Forrester digs into David Cronenberg’s latest work, a fascinating and rich meditation on loss, the digital age, and more. Where on release, David Cronenberg’s superlative Crimes of the Future (2022), about a network of scientist-performance artists facing a need to reckon with man’s legacy of plastic… Read more »
Chris Smalls on the frontlines of the Amazon Labor Union Noni Ford discusses the historic events at the heart of the new documentary from award-winning filmmaker Brett Story and her co-director Stephen Maing. When you envision a march, a rally, a union, you picture a group of people formed under one ideology or at least… Read more »