Becoming Cousteau

Whether you watched his films and television shows or are simply familiar with his kicky red hat, it’s hard to imagine anyone who doesn’t know the name of famed oceanographer Jacques Cousteau. The Frenchman brought the living world of the oceans into people’s homes and was an early celebrity voice emphasizing the horrors of climate change. But it’s often easy to assume Cousteau lived his entire life underwater — and that’s where director Liz Garbus hopes to tell a new story with "Becoming Cou...

From Denis Villeneuve to Alfred Hitchcock: The 10 greatest movie plot twists

The enigmatic spontaneity of a movie plot twist is an experience like no other and remains one of the oldest cinematic tools to shock, surprise and captivate the audience. Just like the hidden dips and curves of a high-speed rollercoaster ride, you never quite know when, or indeed ‘if’, a twist will happen at all, making the narrative device one that harks back to the fleeting joys of cinema as a mere carnival attraction.  Filmmakers such as M. Night Shyamalan and Christopher Nolan have ...

In Praise Of Movies That Just End (Because They Used To Know When To End)

Seven Samurai, Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 masterpiece (that I, embarrassingly, had not seen until recently) is just under three and a half hours long. But it doesn’t feel long. And this is something I’ve been noticing more and more over the last year and a half – to the point I’ve been having trouble getting back on the same wavelength with modern movies. Because older movies used to "just end." The plot would be over and the credits would roll. Now, a couple of things that need to be pointed ...

Long Voyage Home, The (1940)

"When a man goes to sea, he ought to give up thinking about things on shore." Synopsis: The crew on a British tramp steamer — including Smitty (Ian Hunter), Cocky (Barry Fitzgerald), Yank (Ward Bond), Driscoll (Thomas Mitchell), and Swedes Ole (John Wayne) and Axel (John Qualen) — carouse together while experiencing a variety of challenges, such as Yank being wounded, the crew suspecting Smitty of being a German spy, and Ole’s desire to finally return home to Sweden. Genres, Themes, A...

A History Of Cars In Films

Cars have been highlighted in films throughout history, inspiring many generations and influencing the latest trends. The cars we see on screen have often become our dream cars, that we long to buy or even just rent for a day.So, from James Bond (1964) all the way through to John Wick (2014), here is a shortlist of some of the most iconic cars in films throughout history. One thing is for sure – these cars are so legendary that they will have you researching how to get them on car finance wit...

Year of the Month: Roland Saint-Laurent on LOOK WHO’S TALKING

Part of the late ’80s mini-wave of baby movies, which includes 1987’s Baby Boom and Three Men and a Baby, and 1989’s long-awaited Ghostbusters 2, Look Who’s Talking is, for my money, the most tolerable of the bunch thanks to writer-director Amy Heckerling’s script, which has some solid jokes and manages to avoid being overly cutesy given the premise. The story concerns single mother Mollie (Kirstie Alley), her son Mikey, and cab driver/part-time pilot/general loser James (John Travolta, in hi...

The reason why Ingmar Bergman hated Jean-Luc Godard films

(Credit: Joost Evers / Anefo / Gary Stevens) The reason why Ingmar Bergman hated Jean-Luc Godard films Both Ingmar Bergman and Jean-Luc Godard belong to the elite stratum of filmmakers who facilitated the evolution of cinema. They have made some of the definitive cinematic masterpieces of the 20th century, including the likes of Persona and Pierrot le Fou. Inevitably, their works were always in discourse with each other due to th...

The memory of perfection: Digital faces and nostalgic franchise cinema - Dan Golding, 2021

This article is concerned with the intersection of digitally augmented performance and nostalgia in contemporary Hollywood franchise cinema. The practice of 'de-ageing' or even resurrecting actors following their real-life deaths in films like Tron: Legacy (Joseph Kosinski, 2010), Terminator Genysis (Alan Taylor, 2015), Rogue One (Gareth Edwards, 2016), Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017), Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (J.J. Abrams, 2019), and a large number of Marvel Cinematic Un...

Life in Black and White

Louise Beavers (left) and Fredi Washington in Imitation of Life, 1934 (Everett Collection) Emily Bernard, a Scholar contributing editor, is an essayist and the author of three books, most recently Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine, and editor of two others. Her essays have been reprinted in The Best American Essays and The Best Creative Nonfiction. This excerpt comes from her upcoming book, Unfinished Women: Eight Lives, in which sh...

How Wes Craven reinvented the horror genre, twice

"Horror films don’t create fear. They release it." – Wes Craven "To avoid fainting, keep repeating… ‘it’s only a movie!’" the iconic poster of Wes Craven’s 1972 controversial debut feature reads, sitting somewhere between a genuine warning and a self-reflective comment, as whilst The Last House on the Left is, of course, ‘just a movie’, its subtext speaks to something far more real. The first film in his career-long symphony of horror, the contentious debut feature that concerned itself ...

Experimental Cinema of Neelon Crawford

Working primarily with a hand-wound 16mm Bolex, Neelon Crawford made a series of experimental films from 1968 through 1980. Shot in the US, the United Kingdom, and South America, the films explored light and movement in a variety of landscapes. Crawford manipulated the image through film stocks, filters, frame rates, double- and triple-exposures, animation, editing, and printing, at times adding soundtracks to imagery that ranged from observational to abstract.Crawford’s films were featured i...

Get Reel: Dandy denouements: 20 films with great endings - Milford Daily News

Last month’s column focused on great movie openings. So, it’s only seems fair that this month’s column be devoted to great movie endings. Again, these may not necessarily be the greatest movie endings in cinematic history (though some certainly are), they just happen to be my personal favorites. Again, with a limited amount of space, the list numbers only 20. But before we begin, this column contains plenty of spoilers, so if you haven’t any of the following films, beware. You have been ...

Intentionally Disposable Art: The Teen Agers Films

I am not the only person unduly fascinated by a series of eight cheap, forgettable films released by Monogram Pictures between 1946 and 1948, all starring a malleable cast of diminutive, fully adult actors dubbed the Teen Agers. Podcasts and conversations have convinced me that the Teen Agers films hold a rare fascination for certain people. These people, like me, have been around the block a few more times than necessary on bad movies, and know more than a little bit about 20th century film....

The eye and the gaze - peering into Samuel Beckett’s film called Film - with minor markups - Screen Film Journal

On Samuel Beckett’s film, Film

Did Judy Garland Mainstream the Under-the-Table Blow Job?

Did Judy Garland Mainstream the Under-the-Table Blow Job? Somewhere over the rainbow and under the appetizer lies the hard truth about this hotly contested beej In the spring of 1966, Judy Garland allegedly gave her publicist-turned-lover Tom Green a blow job while dining out. Or as author Gerald Clarke put it in the 2000 biography Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland, Garland and Green "seemed to make love everywhere, Judy even disappearing under the tablecloth at a Santa ...

Knausgaard Focus in other directions

More TLS clips - Food and power metaphor - More - 18 Dec 2020 print edition

Fritz Lang’s ‘M’ and the Aesthetics of Justice

Welcome to The Noirvember Files, a new series dropping the spotlight on essential film noir selections. The titles celebrated here exemplify the style and substance of cinema’s grimiest, most-relatable underbelly. In this entry, we explore Fritz Lang’s terrifying, gritty 1931 manhunt thriller, M. Children disappearing off the streets of Berlin, parents forming their own committee for justice? M demands our attention. The film noir genre explores some pretty dark themes, not least of wh...

CITIZEN KANE: T for Technique and T for Tragedy

Citizen Kane is the greatest movie ever made, but it’s not the greatest movie Orson Welles ever made. In his lifetime, he described the movie as a millstone around his neck. No one could ever appreciate anything else he made because it was always held to that impossible standard. With some distance and critical reappraisal behind us, now we can see that he never really failed to live up to the promise of Citizen Kane. If anything, he surpassed it. Kane reinvented filmmaking, but it looks down...

Night Terrors

Science Fiction Sub-genres

The Oscar - reflexive film

Cry of the Werewolf (review) by JD - Everything2.com

Cry of the Werewolf (review) See all of Cry of the Werewolf, no other writeups in this node. Universal ruled the horror genre during Hollywood's Golden Age, but other film companies crept onto Gothic grounds. In 1935, MGM borrowed Bela Lugosi and made Mark of the Vampire. Columbia put out this low-budget lycanthropic offering in ’44. We're in New Orleans, Louisiana, where the old Latour Mansion has been transformed into a museum of the supernatural. It also apparently has drawn unw...

In Rainbows | Bright Wall/Dark Room

Home Issues Films Contributors Submissions About Subscriptions Merch Issue 36: IdentityIn RainbowsLindsey Romain illustration by Brianna Ashby and Harper Ashby R – I am four and my mother is braiding my hair so I can look like Dorothy. I think all children have this need for affectation; there was my Ariel phase and my Belle phase but there is most important...

never seen the Wizard of Oz

"I know that this is irrational, self-sabotaging behavior. I’ve never seen The Wizard of Oz or The Sound of Music simply because my godmother keeps telling me I must; once a critical mass of my peers became obsessed with the Lord of the Rings series, I had to make peace with the fact that I would never watch it. And because I am a Film Bro™ who is friends with many other Film Bros™, I avoided both Heat and Jackie Brown until 2019. Again: I recognize that this is irrational self-sabotage. It i...