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When the Movies Mattered
Siskel and Ebert and the heyday of popular movie criticism.
by
Annie Berke
via
The Yale Review
on
June 12, 2024
The Trouble With Uplift
A curiously inflexible brand of race-first neoliberalism has taken root in American political discourse.
by
Adolph Reed Jr.
via
The Baffler
on
September 4, 2018
Feeling Versus Fact: Reconciling Ava DuVernay’s Retelling of Selma
“There has never been an honest movie about the civil rights movement,” says civil rights leader Julian Bond.
by
Daniel Judt
via
The Politic
on
March 28, 2015
Fools in Love
Screwball comedies are beloved films, but for decades historians and critics have disagreed over what the genre is and which movies belong to it.
by
Andrew Katzenstein
via
New York Review of Books
on
August 29, 2024
Why Are So Many Horror Movies Set at Summer Camp?
Isolation and a heady mix of hormones and fear provide the perfect setting for bloody revenge.
by
Gavia Baker-Whitelaw
via
Atlas Obscura
on
June 17, 2024
Brando Unmatched
The legendary actor left a mark in both film history and an industry fraught with self-regard.
by
Giancarlo Sopo
via
The Dispatch
on
April 27, 2024
Oppenheimer’s Second Coming
Japanese were interested when Oppenheimer visited Japan as an honored guest in 1960. Will they be also interested in the Nolan film released today in Japan?
by
Gregory Kulacki
via
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
on
March 28, 2024
Exorcising American Domestic Violence
The Exorcist in 1973 and 2023.
by
Eleanor Johnson
via
Public Books
on
December 13, 2023
original
Reviewing the Oppenheimer Reviews
Christopher Nolan's blockbuster has generated a torrent of historical commentary about the birth of nuclear weapons. Is there something missing from the conversation?
by
Kathryn Ostrofsky
on
August 25, 2023
‘Oppenheimer’ Doesn’t Show us Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That's an Act of Rigor, Not Erasure
The movie has no interest in reducing the atomic bombings to a trivializing, exploitative spectacle, despite what some would want.
by
Justin Chang
via
Los Angeles Times
on
August 11, 2023
What Hollywood’s Ultimate Oral History Reveals
For all the clouds of publicity, the dream machine is actually a craft business. Have we asked too much of it?
by
Adam Gopnik
via
The New Yorker
on
November 28, 2022
How “Who Killed Fourth Ward?” Challenged the Nature of Documentary Filmmaking
James Blue’s film investigated the destruction of a Black neighborhood in Houston, but it is also a powerful self-interrogation.
by
Richard Brody
via
The New Yorker
on
January 21, 2022
History Lessons on Film: Reconsidering Judas and the Black Messiah
Historians should watch films like Judas and the Black Messiah as much for their filmmaking as their history making.
by
Nathalie Barton
via
Perspectives on History
on
June 3, 2021
Deconstructing Disney: Queer Coding and Masculinity in Pocahontas
Disney gets inventive when they need to circumvent white people’s historical responsibility for genocidal atrocities — and queerness is a useful scapegoat.
by
Jeanna Kadlec
via
Longreads
on
April 1, 2021
The Strange Undeath of Middlebrow
Everything that was once considered lowbrow is now triumphant.
by
Phil Christman
via
The Hedgehog Review
on
March 25, 2021
Greil Marcus Takes a Deep Dive Into "the Stubborn Myth of The Great Gatsby"
An insightful exploration of the ways America has read ‘the Great American Novel.’
by
Allen Barra
via
The National Book Review
on
July 17, 2020
‘1917’ and the Trouble With War Movies
"Every film about war ends up being pro-war," Francois Truffaut once said.
by
Adam Nayman
via
The Ringer
on
January 29, 2020
What Should a Slavery Epic Do?
If there’s anything the 2010s taught us, it’s that there is no getting these stories right, no honoring with grace the dead and ghosts.
by
Lauren Michele Jackson
via
Vulture
on
December 26, 2019
The Decade Comic Book Nerds Became Our Cultural Overlords
Why do they have to be such sore winners?
by
Alex Pappademas
via
Medium
on
December 10, 2019
partner
The War Documentary That Never Was
John Huston's 1945 movie The Battle of San Pietro presents itself as a war documentary, but contains staged scenes. What should we make of it?
by
Kristin Hunt
via
JSTOR Daily
on
December 5, 2019
Fandom: A Star Wars Story
This is about much more than Star Wars—it is about media bias and "information disorder" in the twenty-first century.
by
William Proctor
via
Contingent
on
December 4, 2019
‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ is a Science Fiction Film
Far from wallowing in nostalgia, Tarantino is using alternative history to critique conventional Hollywood endings.
by
Jeet Heer
via
The Nation
on
August 23, 2019
Death Proof
With ‘Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood,’ Tarantino slakes his thirst for nostalgia while playing with another piece of history.
by
Soraya Roberts
via
Longreads
on
August 1, 2019
Gump Talk
25 years later, what does Gump mean?
via
Contingent
on
July 1, 2019
“Swinging While I’m Singing”: Spike Lee, Public Enemy, and the Message in the Music
Public Enemy's "Fight the Power," featured in Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing," embodied many sentiments of a black generation.
by
Mark Anthony Neal
via
Black Perspectives
on
June 24, 2019
How Spaghetti Westerns Shaped Modern Cinema
In the realism, the set pieces, the operatic music, Sergio Leone was pointing the way towards modern filmmaking.
by
Quentin Tarantino
via
The Spectator
on
June 1, 2019
"Native Son" and the Cinematic Aspirations of Richard Wright
Novelist Richard Wright yearned to break into film, but Hollywood's censorship of black stories left his aspirations unfulfilled.
by
Anna Shechtman
via
The New Yorker
on
April 4, 2019
partner
How ‘The Highwaymen’ Whitewashes Frank Hamer and the Texas Rangers
The film’s hero left a legacy of racist violence in Texas.
by
Monica Muñoz Martinez
via
Made by History
on
March 31, 2019
'Reality Bites' Captured Gen X With Perfect Irony
The 1994 studio film was written by a 20-something who mined her own life to tell the story of a generation that disdained 'selling out.'
by
Soraya Roberts
via
The Atlantic
on
March 6, 2019
Colorizing and Fictionalizing the Past
The technical wizardry of Peter Jackson's "They Shall Not Grow Old" should not obscure its narrow, outdated storyline.
by
Bridget Keown
via
Nursing Clio
on
February 12, 2019
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