Every month, Establishing Shot brings you a selection of films from our group of regular bloggers. Even though these films aren’t currently being screened at the IU Cinema, this series reflects the varied programming that can be found at the Cinema and demonstrates the eclectic tastes of the bloggers. Each contributor has picked one film that they… Read more »
It is an inescapable fact that we don’t deserve Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Separately, together, it doesn’t matter. They were just too beautiful, too miraculous, too good. By the time I laid eyes on their second collaboration, Bringing Up Baby, in high school, I was already head over heels for Kate and Cary, but… Read more »
David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) has usually been celebrated for its weirdly oneiric narrative hijinks and its unsettling doublings of character. In 2012, the critic Miriam Bale identified the film as a key entry in a subgenre she coined the “persona swap” film, in which the personalities of two female characters become blended or swapped… Read more »
Okay, I’ll be honest, Decision to Leave might be one of the hardest films I’ve had to define. Just when I think it’s a buddy comedy, it turns on its head and becomes more of a neo-noir (but more in terms of story and characterization than mise-en-scene), and then right when it’s settling into that,… 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 »
In the cinema of Leo McCarey, the act of socializing takes on paramount importance. The rhythms of his films, and the way that they make meaning, largely derive from his direction of actors and from the characters’ behavior toward one another within the fiction — the ways that they look at, listen and react to… Read more »