Tag: cinema
Black-and-White Movies: Meditating on Monochrome
In the days before DVDs, when my sister and I were kids, our parents would often stage movie nights, a post-homework foray during which we’d all watch a film of their choice on VHS in their bedroom. On one such occasion – and much to our dismay – they picked North by Northwest (1959), leading…
Lot in Sodom: Reading Film Against the Grain
Many of the film reviews that circulate in the blogosphere are written by and for laymen. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that (I’m more or less a layman, after all), but every now and then I crave a deeper analysis—specifically, one that takes into account the formal elements of filmmaking. In addition, I often notice…
Blue Ruin: Deconstructing the Storyteller
Unless you are intimately involved in a movie’s production, it can be virtually impossible to determine where the writer’s role ends and the director’s begins, or how much credit/blame to assign to the actor or the cinematographer. One of the reasons the auteur theory gained such credibility in the past half century is that it…
Mainstream Masala: 5 Off-Beat Bollywood Movies to Get You Started
Movies are an integral part of India. There are a range of filmmaking centres across the country, the most famous being Bollywood, which is focused primarily on the production of Hindi movies. But there are other regional “woods”, like Tollywood (Bengali), Kollywood (Tamil) and Mollywood (Malayalam) amongst others, all of which produce movies in their…
Interviewing Keith Gordon: From De Palma to ‘Dexter’
Keith Gordon may not drive a Plymouth Fury like his character does in Christine (1983), but he finds other ways to get noticed – right now by directing hit shows for television. In truth, though, he has already made an indelible mark on cinema with sensitively crafted independent films such as A Midnight Clear (1992)…