The Jewel in the Crown
‘The Man Who Would Be King’ turns fifty.
Graham Daseler
· 21 min read
Cinema
A collection of 110 posts
Holding Out for a Hero
From Achilles to Anakin Skywalker, the messiah myth has evolved from religious prophecy to cautionary tale.
Stewart Slater
· 12 min read
The Feminist, the Filmmaker, and the Führer
Susan Sontag’s 1974 essay about Leni Riefenstahl and fascist aesthetics displayed the critic at her most stiflingly moralistic and aristocratic.
Annalisa Zox-Weaver
· 25 min read
Out of the Past
A new book looks back on the making of Billy Wilder’s American classic.
Graham Daseler
· 11 min read
The Mediocrity Feedback Loop
If leading media critics don’t expect much, filmmakers won’t deliver much.
Charlotte Allen
· 15 min read
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