Reviews

Blog: Looking at Akira Kurosawa’s Staging in SEVEN SAMURAI (1954)

Director Akira Kurosawa’s towering landmark, Seven Samurai, is a universally praised, timeless jewel of world cinema, but it also represents a personal landmark on my journey into cinephilia. This was decades ago (*shudder*) in the halcyon days of Netflix rentals, when a red envelope containing Seven Samurai arrived on my doorstep alongside Jean Renoir’s The Grand Illusion and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The…
Blog: Robert Bresson’s Sleight of Hand in L’ARGENT (1983)

If film as an artistic medium is measurable by its effectiveness at visually expressing thoughts, concepts, emotions, and/or ideas, then you’d be hard-pressed to find a better purveyor of the form than Robert Bresson. His career as a filmmaker spanned almost fifty years and yet he only directed 13 feature films, garnering praise and renown…
Blog: Life On The Road in Agnes Varda’s VAGABOND (1985)

“I’d like to be a caretaker. To look after houses. Look after guard-dogs. There are so many big houses…so many rooms…” Emptiness, in all its forms, is ever present in Agnes Varda’s 1985 road *document, VAGABOND. The sentiment above is expressed by Mona, a young vagrant girl traveling the French countryside, during one of a…
Blog: Family, THE LODGER (1927), and The Big Moral Dilemma in Hitchcock’s SHADOW OF A DOUBT (1943)

The realization that your parents, or anyone in your immediate familial orbit (siblings, aunts, uncles) are flawed people, no matter which race, ethnicity, religion, political affiliation, or economic background you hail from, is something that eventually comes to us all. For some, it arrives tragically too soon. And for others it may come, mercifully or…
Blog: Psychoanalysis, Family, and Growth in THE BROOD (1979)

It should come as no surprise that body horror makes me uncomfortable – that’s the intention. It is a distinctly grotesque subgenre filled with all manner of gross effects. It’s also a very fertile metaphorical pasture. Of course much of horror can make us feel uneased, but there is something uniquely unsettling about our physical…