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 »
A lurker in the river makes itself known in Gareth Edwards’s Monsters Chris Forrester praises the underrated early work of blockbuster filmmaker Gareth Edwards. Before he became the face of the “almost good!” blockbuster with Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) and The Creator (2023), Gareth Edwards made a name for himself with a… Read more »
Poster of Gerd Wiesler played by the late Ulrich Mühe in The Lives of Others Noni Ford studies the questions of morality, complicity, and humanity that permeate the Oscar-winning German drama The Lives of Others. Why do so many pieces of media that involve an overbearing authoritarian government feature male leads who are working from… Read more »