The Mediocrity Feedback Loop
If leading media critics don’t expect much, filmmakers won’t deliver much.
Charlotte Allen
· 15 min read
Cinema
A collection of 105 posts
It Don’t Worry Me
Robert Altman’s ‘Nashville’ is fifty.
Matt Hanson
· 7 min read
The Forgotten Ford
Before Han Solo and Indiana Jones, there was another Harrison Ford, a star of silent cinema.
Christian Kriticos
· 15 min read
It’s No Longer 1937...
Disney’s awful new Snow White adaptation fails to recreate or even understand the story it is trying to tell.
Charlotte Allen
· 18 min read
How The Blues Brothers Saved American Music
The Blues Brothers (1980) fostered a renewed appreciation of some of the best music America has ever produced.
Jacob Bielecki
· 12 min read
The Age When Nothing Fits
‘Rebel Without a Cause’ remains a landmark classic, seventy years after its release.
Jarrod Sturnieks
· 12 min read
Brave New Marvel
Despite serious flaws, ‘Captain America: Brave New World’ is much better than Marvel’s recent offerings. Perhaps the franchise may have turned the corner.
William Barker
· 8 min read
Epic Failure
Many of the people involved in Uberto Pasolini’s new screen adaptation of Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ are intimidatingly talented. It’s a pity, then, that the film is such a disaster.
Jaspreet Singh Boparai
· 14 min read
All Men Behaving Badly
Just six months after it was released by Netflix, Anna Kendrick’s feminist film about a real serial killer already looks like an ideological relic.
Charlotte Allen
· 23 min read
Master of Cinema
Éric Rohmer’s films demand patience and close attention, but they are immensely rewarding for those able to tolerate the absence of spectacle.
Jaspreet Singh Boparai
· 24 min read
The Many Faces of ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’
Alexandre Dumas’s novel is by turns an adventure story, a paean to bourgeois values, and a Greek epic. No wonder it continues to fascinate.
Stewart Slater
· 9 min read
Gender Bending Mobster Mash
With ‘Emilia Pérez,’ Jacques Audiard created—intentionally or unintentionally—a subversive assault on every plank of the current transgender credo.
Charlotte Allen
· 16 min read
Scandalous Monogamy and Faithful Infidelity
On eros and marriage.
Marilyn Simon
· 12 min read
Mammy Dearest
Richard Bernstein’s new book about Al Jolson and ‘The Jazz Singer’ offers a thoughtful reconsideration of an unfairly reviled cultural landmark.
Graham Daseler
· 14 min read
Architecture as Revenge
Brady Corbet’s panoramic epic, ‘The Brutalist,’ may be technically brilliant, but it is a cheat and a fraud.
Charlotte Allen
· 15 min read