Divided into three sections: Fear, Flight, and Fate, Richard Wright’s novel, Native Son, took an existentialist approach to Blackness in America. It’s right there in the titles of the section, and it’s baked into every frame of the 1951 cinematic adaptation … Continue reading NATIVE SON
Hubert Sauper is in search of a utopia. The Austrian filmmaker has been searching for some time now, just not as bluntly as in his latest documentary: Epicentro. Here, he opens with a man leaving a cinema to stand on a … Continue reading EPICENTRO
Back in 2017, Kino Lorber restored and released a series of films from Italian filmmaker Lina Wermüller, a powerhouse on the world stage. Wertmüller is still with us—she’s 92 as of Aug. 14—as are her films. Seven Beauties from 1975 … Continue reading Women Make Film: Lina Wertmüller
Movies echo movies. Sometimes in the minds of the filmmakers: Conversations in sound and image across time and space. Sometimes in the viewer’s minds: Stories ping-ponging their way through a couple of thousand years of recorded history. More often than … Continue reading AMERICAN BOY: A PROFILE OF STEVEN PRINCE
“The canon is the canon,” Mark Cousins said at the 2019 Telluride Film Festival. “It’s robust. It’s resistant to change. It’s impervious to truth.” That truth he’s referring to is the canon’s sexism. And its racism. It’s elevation by way … Continue reading Ida Lupino: Filmmaker Collection
Silent pictures are the purest form of cinema. —Alfred Hitchcock For many, he was the Master of Suspense. The eyes and hands behind Rear Window, Vertigo, North By Northwest, Psycho, and The Birds. The droll voice and the rotund figure behind the popular TV show, Alfred … Continue reading Blu Tuesday — Hitchcock: British International Pictures Collection
Three men work the line at the Checkered Taxi auto plant in Detroit, Michigan. Their lives revolve around hard labor and heavy drinking, getting yelled at by their supervisors and trying to keep their heads above water at home. They’re … Continue reading Blu Tuesday: BLUE COLLAR
It must have come as a surprise to filmgoers in the mid-90s that the next Martin Scorsese feature film would focus on the childhood of the 14th Dalai Lama. Then again, it probably came as a similar surprise in the … Continue reading Blu Tuesday: KUNDUN
Released in 1989, New York Stories is an omnibus film, three shorts stitched together by a city. And though two of the directors’ oeuvres are inseparable from the city streets, tenements, and high rises that dot the New York skyline, it is … Continue reading Blu Tuesday: NEW YORK STORIES
Buster Keaton was destined for the silver screen before moving pictures were even born. As the story goes, an 18-month-old (or was that six-month-old?) Keaton took a tumble down a flight of stairs and didn’t make a sound. “That’s some … Continue reading Blu Tuesday: OUR HOSPITALITY
