Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave is tense and unflinching. Its relentless intensity and graphic brutality has been the defining feature in the media, but it is also an essential part of the film and the primary reason it could become the most important portrait of American slavery yet on camera.
When I was young my mother would take me to the local theater for the free weekly movie. I watched everything they showed, sobbing through Peter Pan, laughing through Shrek 2, openly weeping at the death of Mufasa. It was my mom’s love of cinematic tales that really sparked my interest in film.
At 10:55 p.m. on a Sunday night, I am obsessively checking my Facebook. After clearing my notification (singular notification, because it has only been about ten minutes since I last checked it. Okay, it’s been two minutes. Judge me.) and … Read More
Lena Dunham, a 23-year-old filmmaker from New York who has a degree in film studies from Oberlin, plays Aura, a 22-year-old Oberlin grad with a “useless” film studies degree, in Lena Dunham’s first feature as a director, _Tiny Furniture_, written … Read More
Blue Valentine writer and director Derek Cianfrance’s latest film The Place Beyond the Pines is, if anything, a study in what Robert Penn Warren, legendary 1940s author of All the King’s Men, calls “the awful responsibility of Time.” We begin with Ryan Gosling’s character Luke Glanton, a reckless circus-performing motorcyclist. Seemingly out of nowhere, Luke has great responsibility thrust upon him when an old flame from an upstate New York carnival stop steps back into his life with his infant son.
As _Avatar_ gradually accrued its second billion dollars in the last few weeks, coverage of the film itself (rather than its receipts) sank from complacent praise to idle speculation. Was the film racist? Well, accidentally. Is there going to be … Read More
“If Ackerley perceives his dependent, female dog as essentially human, this is a strong statement regarding Ackerley’s beliefs about women in general. In fact, many of his statements regarding Tulip, throughout the film, feel steeped in misogyny, given that they are not statements generally associated with dogs.”
