By Jake Triola As we approach both the release of the second of five—yes, five—Fantastic Beasts films, as well as the release of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, which has dazzled the festival circuit, taking the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, it seems like the right moment to revisit Harry Potter and the Prisoner of … Continue reading
By Jake Triola If ever there were a filmmaker obsessed with the relationship between film and literature, it’s François Truffaut, who is noted as saying “three films a day, three books a week, and records of great music would be enough to make me happy to the day I die.” A constant reader throughout his … Continue reading
By Jackson Diianni Django Unchained (2012) gives us a superhero in place of a slave. It’s a film that mocks racism, slavery and white supremacy in the most masturbatory way possible. The point is that people can go to the movies and see Jamie Foxx kicking a slave-owner’s ass, or see the KKK fumbling with … Continue reading
By Jake Triola John Huston’s late-career film, Wise Blood, is a 1979 adaptation of Flannery O’Connor’s 1952 novel, which, as an intended parody of existentialism, follows a war veteran who sets out to form “The Holy Church of Christ Without Christ,” as an avowed atheist sickened by the spread of evangelicalism in the southern … Continue reading
By Jackson Diianni Although usually regarded as one of the worst Best Picture winners, Crash (2004) is not without support. Probably its most famous defender is Roger Ebert, who gave it a perfect 4/4 review. He calls it a movie of “intense fascination”, explaining that, “not many films have the possibility of making their audiences … Continue reading
By Jake Triola Why help someone who doesn’t want it? If their life depends on it, maybe something, from somewhere, tells the apathetic, bourgeois part of our hearts that to act and, thus, make the choice to be a do-gooder, is just our duty as humans floating on a rock shrouded in mystery. Jean Renoir’s … Continue reading
By Jake Triola It’s been nearly fifty years since the release of Ken Loach’s Kes (1969), and the film’s fabulist quality still permeates the screen, feeling fresh as ever. The idea that a movie like Kes contains the subject material that it does is at once antithetical and apt, being a product of the social … Continue reading
