Two-Lane Blacktop (Monte Hellman, 1971) opens on a street race. Engines roar prominently on the soundtrack, and we get a montage of tarmac, cars, and a few close-ups of The Driver (James Taylor) that will become one of our main characters. No one speaks. When The Driver finally does speak – after the opening credits… Read more »
Fantasy and science fiction have always offered an incredible amount of possibility to storytelling. When you have rules and worlds you can make up and change at the whim of a keystroke it can be easy to get lost in the nuts and bolts. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course. Some very good films… Read more »
When it comes to the movie musical, there are two giants whose presences are inescapable: Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. The impact of these legendary men cannot be overestimated — from movies to TV shows to music videos to commercials, Astaire and Kelly are still influencing pop culture and reaching new audiences every day. However,… Read more »
Guest post by Terri Francis. Jamaica’s history with motion pictures radiates in multiple directions within a broad aesthetic and geographic framework that reflects its transnational and multicultural realities. Such an approach challenges a number of conventions in both film studies and Caribbean studies. The division between nonfiction and fiction films becomes less important if we… Read more »
Guest post by Tyne Lowe. In the first thirty minutes of Miss Hokusai, artist O-Ei walks through Edo with her blind younger sister, O-Nao, and attempts to explain their father’s art to her. The viewer has been introduced to their father, Katsushiko Hokusai (referred to in the film as Tetsuzo), as a somewhat eccentric and… Read more »
By now, it’s no secret among genre aficionados and admirers of Hong Kong cinema that Lau Kar-leung (1934-2013) was among the world’s finest practitioners of the martial arts film and, by extension, of the action film more broadly. Lau, a filmmaker of considerable artistic stature in his home country, is one of the more well-known… Read more »