Tag: film
David Cronenberg’s Films Ranked from Worst to Best (Part One)
“You Should Know How Bad This Movie Is: You Paid for It.” That was the headline of Robert Fulford’s consideration of David Cronenberg’s first broadly released, publicly financed feature film, Shivers, in 1975. Fast forward twenty years. Evening Standard film critic Alexander Walker after seeing Cronenberg’s latest film, Crash, in Cannes: “Beyond the bounds of…
Reviewing ‘It Follows’: An Encounter with a Sexually Transmitted Demon
“This thing. It’s going to follow you. Somebody gave it to me and I passed it to you […] All you can do is pass it along to someone else.” And so Jay (Maika Monroe) suddenly finds herself sharing her life with a tireless, invisible hell-creature bent on brutally murdering her. The idea of a…
Rethinking Birdman: Buddha comes to Broadway
The first frame in Birdman has Michael Keaton levitating in mid-air, in a meditational posture. At other times the camera lingers on a golden head of the Buddha. What is going on? Is Birdman, as some have claimed, a Buddhist film? There is other evidence for this. In the midst of his panic and egoistic…
Getting Vocal About Voiceovers: The Problem With Movie Narration
While watching the abominable, pretentious film The Longest Week (2014) the other night, I became aware of a horrifying trend—a cynical, mean-spirited pattern so insidious that it threatens our own culture and everything we prize surrounding it. That’s right. I’m talking about unnecessary movie narration … one of the most disturbing problems the world is…
Carl Theodor Dreyer: A Film Primer
I had an epiphany recently. As epiphanies go, it wasn’t a very big one. In fact, it was one I have had too many times to count. Maybe I should call it by a different name. Maybe it was one of those temporary epiphanies. I was on a lovely vacation. It was in a place…