Tag: movies
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)…
Das Kino Deutschlands: An appreciation of German Cinema
I do not intend to cover the history of the cinematic output of Germany; that would take a book, and many already exist. However, I have noticed German films mentioned on CURNBLOG occasionally, and I would like to offer some for consideration, and hopefully introduce them to new viewers. Before the Second World War, many…