A Cultural Film

Mar 23, 2021 — “Pleasure,” wrote Samuel Butler in The Way of All Flesh, “is a safer guide than either right or duty.” Surely this is true when it comes to watching films. While cinema can be edifying, most of us go to the...

Aug 7, 2020 — This week we’re reading about Setsuko Hara, Satyajit Ray, Buster Keaton, Rita Azevedo Gomes, and Beyoncé.

Jan 24, 2018 — We begin with Rolling Stone’s David Fear: “Pick any random song by the Coup—we suggest ‘Fat Cats, Bigga Fish’ from their 1994 album Genocide & Juice, or ‘My Favorite Mutiny’ from 2006’s Pick a Bigger Weapon—and you'll get complex anti-corporate...

Jun 18, 2007 — Yasujiro Ozu had already directed forty-five features by the time he started work on Early Spring, in 1955, but the artistic and commercial success of his previous film, Tokyo Story (1953), had rejuvenated him.

Oct 15, 2050 — Voice-over narration has existed since the beginnings of cinema and has been an integral part of some of the great masterworks of narrative film, from The Magnificent Ambersons to Double Indemnity to Jules and Jim to Taxi Driver. It spans...

Beandrea July is a film critic, podcast host, and programmer. She created Annotations, a podcast and Substack newsletter on thinking critically about cultural criticism.

Kier-La Janisse is a film writer, producer, and acquisitions executive for Severin Films. She is the author of Cockfight: A Fable of Failure (2024), House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (2012/2022),...

Roberto Chiesi is cultural director of the Centro Studi—Archivio Pier Paolo Pasolini at the Cineteca di Bologna and a film critic for the Italian magazines Cineforum and Segnocinema. This piece originally appeared in the Criterion Collection’s 2008 DVD edition of...

Feb 25, 2013 — When an ethnographic filmmaker and a sociologist joined forces, they helped change the course of nonfiction cinema.

Sep 13, 2011 — Hollywood has been importing talented European filmmakers at least since the early twenties, when Victor Sjöström and Ernst Lubitsch heeded the siren wail of Tinseltown resources, and their work there has tended to quickly obscure the cultural memory of the...