Anguish

Jul 10, 2019 — En route to the Czech Republic’s Karlovy Vary Film Festival in the summer of 2006, I stopped off for some sightseeing in Prague. Having dutifully made the rounds of the city’s hopping tourist spots, I retreated to my bare-bones hotel...

Jul 3, 2019 — Punk has been tamed, punk has been neutered, punk has been domesticated. The album The Stooges is fifty years old this August, and the music of omnidirectional bile and antiauthoritarianism that it anticipated has been museumified, the subject of a...

Jun 14, 2019 — On the late Peter Whitehead, Jordan Peele’s Us, drag culture, European refugees, and images of incarceration

Apr 30, 2019 — With these twin monuments of Hong Kong action filmmaking, Jackie Chan catapulted to international stardom, perfecting a unique blend of athleticism and populism.

Apr 15, 2019 — She was known as “a professional innocent”—until Persona (1966) revealed a complex emotional intelligence.

Oct 2, 2018 — Performances There’s an irreducible reserve about Kristen Stewart, an appearance of not doing much on-screen, that I mistook for lack of talent when I first saw her mumbling into her shirt in the Twilight franchise. Still, playing Bella Swan, chastity...

May 20, 2018 — A lifelong movie collector remembers the thrill of discovering the granddaddy of all monsters on Super 8.

Feb 1, 2018 — G. W. Pabst’s breathlessly paced reimagining of a mine disaster makes an urgent plea for international cooperation in the post–World War I era.

Jan 21, 2018 — “After innumerable plays, books, films, made-for-TV series and specials, and even an opera and a musical, you would think popular culture would have exhausted all the options for telling the story of Lizzie Borden, the New England woman who was...

Nov 17, 2017 — G rasshopper Film has posted Ted Fendt’s essay on Moses and Aaron (1974), Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s adaptation of Arnold Schoenberg’s unfinished opera: “Straub and Huillet’s brilliance—and a fundamental aspect of their method of adaptation—is to allow the contradictions...