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A review of Paul Louis Metzger’s CONSUMING JESUS: BEYOND RACE AND CLASS DIVISIONS IN A CONSUMER CHURCH.

There is also an excellent article on Makhmalbaf’s life and cinema in the latest Cineaste. A highpoint of the essay is the way The Cyclist, which has long been one of my favorite films, is posed as a transitional film. Both formally and biographically, one can see Makhmalbaf caught between dialectics of past and present, […]

From among the most recent Cineaste offerings comes a review of a new collection of essays called Inventing Film Studies. In the review, Michael Sicinski loosely outlines debates about the history of film criticism as well as most of the essays in the collection. One of the most notable seems to be an essay by […]

“She had passed the day waiting for an apology from Ilsa Brooks, with whom she had had a falling out after arguing over a movie they had seen together on a recent Sunday afternoon. Ilsa had thought the film was a return to the screwball romantic comedies of the nineteen-thirties, but Mrs. Zegerman wanted to […]

One could say that niggling over refined definitions is too much to ask of a bagatelle such as this, that to probe too deeply into the relationship of body/soul/spirit would be to burden a mere entertainment with the weight of a philosopher’s stone. Then let’s just say it would have made for a more engaging and effective satire if we had been introduced not to Giamatti the Oscar-nominated actor but to Giamatti the Everyman—a Prisoner of Second Avenue at the end of his rope, plagued by anxiety, resentment, and dissatisfaction, and whose life and relationships we are actually privy to.

Orson Welles: I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won’t contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That’s what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.

One blog that’s reliably fascinating is If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats. Predominantly visual, they regularly post intriguing images from film and other pop culture (and occasionally slightly higher culture, for that matter). Today’s post is nifty, screenshots that feature “frame within the frame” composition. Here’s a […]

Akira Kurosawa’s epic Samurai films are among the greatest movies ever made. But it is a quiet, intimate story about a very different sort of hero, a mid-level bureaucrat confronted with the futility of his own life, that may be the director’s masterpiece. Certainly it’s one of his most spiritual films.

An interview with Cornel West on a range of issues, including politics, religion, power, language, the economy, and race.