On paper, Upstream Color ticks a remarkable number of my boxes: Carruth? ✓ Lengthy sequences sans dialogue? ✓ Auteur struggle vibe? ✓ Economy of image across multiple planes of action? ✓ Responsive PR contact? ✓ Fetching composition? ✓ Alternative distribution? ✓ Arboreal? ✓ Really cosmic stuff going on? ✓ Pascalian images of the “condition of men”? ✓ Lack of exposition? ✓ Rudy Rucker meets Orchid […]
I missed this post over at Pop Theology about a book to which I contributed last year, edited by Jeff Sellars (Light Shining in a Dark Place). I wrote a chapter called “Recalling Jesus: Form, Theory, and Trauma in Jesus Cinema.” Which the post summarizes well: He argues, quite rightly, “Excepting discussion of films like The Passion […]
Very long ago I decided to start a series here I was calling the “Alternative History of Jesus,” and then I stopped after two. There were two reasons for this. First, I have been really busy. Second, I thought that the series would actually make a decent book – which would also give me the […]
Curator Magazine posted my review of To The Wonder last week. It was a delight to write for them. But more could have been said about the O’Keefe orchid and succulent shots, the shot focus on the mirror image of the unicorn in one of the medieval “Lady and the Unicorn” tapestries, the Lorica of St. Patrick, […]
(Ed. note: A very welcome, detailed, and incisive guest post from Ryan Holt, who does not write enough about cinema over here. This is the second post in a series on De Palma and Chris Dumas’ recent book Un-American Psycho.) In his “film essay” on forgery and deceit, F for Fake, Orson Welles performs a magic trick […]
(Ed. note: A very welcome, detailed, and incisive guest post from Ryan Holt, who does not write enough about cinema over here. This is the first post in a series on De Palma and Chris Dumas’ recent book Un-American Psycho.) “You see, several years ago, long after the floods, moisture seeped into a portion of the altarpiece, […]
(Join Jeffrey Overstreet and Michael Leary as they discuss the Top Ten films from the recent Sight & Sound Greatest Films poll. Visit the “Sight & Sounds Greatest Films Conversation” tag for previous installments.) ML: This was an interesting biographical experience. I haven’t seen this film for many years, long enough that I think I […]
“The term ‘imagination’ in what I take to be its truest sense refers to a mental faculty that some people have used and thought about with the utmost seriousness. The sense of the verb “to imagine” contains the full richness of the verb ‘to see.’ To imagine is to see most clearly, familiarly, and understandingly […]
(ed. note): This is a guest post from Nicholas Olson, whose bio has now been added to our list of contributors. Looking forward to much more from Nick.) Last year’s big theme at the cinema was nostalgia, or apocalypse, or both depending on who you ask. It struck me recently that several of my favorite […]