We as a society have a real problem dealing with ourselves. Especially when it comes to women. Despite making up over half of our population, years of minimization and the bolstering of a patriarchal model have, with no true reasoning, positioned women as lesser. In the very way women are…
Barbara Stanwyck was already a star when she began work on Baby Face (1933), one of the most scandalous films of Hollywood’s pre-Code era. Known for her films made with Frank Capra as well as a series of typical pre-Code roles — nurse, struggling housewife, fallen woman with a heart of gold — Stanwyck in 1933 was one of Warner Bros. Studios’ newest, freshest stars. The studio’s reputation for ….
With its primal preoccupations and more importantly, modest, often low, budgets, the horror genre can be the entry point for first-time or even second-time directors. For indie filmmaker David Robert Mitchell, the writer-director behind 2011’s underappreciated, under-seen coming-of-teenage-drama, The Myth of the American Sleepover, the horror genre offered him the perfect opportunity to venture into …
About two-thirds into director Kirby Dick’s (This Film is Not Yet Rated) latest documentary, The Hunting Ground, an alarming, but no less timely or essential, examination of the rape crisis on university campuses in the United States, one of the interviewees describes the personal arc undergone by several women Kirby features …
Preston Sturges was one of the great talents to emerge in the 1940s. One of the first writer/directors in the Hollywood studio system, he made a string of great films over the course of about four years starting with his debut The Great McGinty in 1940, The Lady Eve and perhaps his masterpiece Sullivan’s Travels in 1941, The Palm Beach Story in 1942 …
Words like ‘masterpiece’ and ‘brilliant’ are often thrown around nowadays, being applied to things that are not either but due to a generational misunderstanding of intensifiers, we now ‘epic’ to describe everything from something appropriately grandiose to a sandwich. So when I say that the film noir classic Double Indemnity is Billy Wilder’s first directorial …
It’s impossible to dislike Vince Vaughn. Even when the material he’s been given is mundanely lifeless and painfully beneath him, he gives it his all. He’s just fun to watch. Even in cinematic disasters like The Dilemma or The Internship, Vaughn projects this zany, fast-talking, profane personality that is immediately hilarious and believable. It’s the …
Focus is an intriguing little mixed bag of heavy style and breezy romantic comedy, delivered by a writer-director team that is swiftly becoming the go-to duo for such oddball combos. Glenn Ficarra and John Requa fashion themselves as specialists of two-tone filmmaking. Look no further than their early credits as a writing team, where they …
It doesn’t matter how many times we are exposed to the ballet, there’s always an air of mystery about the spectacle. Jody Lee Lipes’s Ballet 422 reveals what goes into mounting these productions from inception to its final fruition.
It’s been a while since I’ve been riled up by a music event and I guess the Grammys this year brought its share of memes and discussions. There was a photo going around the internet about amount of writers it took to write Beyonce’s album while Beck was seen as one man writing band. This brought to mind the fact that many incredible albums have …