Film & Television
New Values and a New Quest
On Sunday, Pixar’s Brave won a Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature Film. We recently had a chance to talk with its producer, Katherine Serafian. Here's what she had to say. ...
Other Post
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Hugo's Hope: "Les Misérables" on Screen and Stage
January 09, 2013 -
Peter Jackson's "The Hobbit": Embellishment is an Understatement
December 14, 2012 -
Freaks, Geeks, and Subverting the Politics of Fashion
December 07, 2012 -
A Film Divided
December 03, 2012 -
"Life of Pi" Isn't Enough
November 26, 2012 -
Packing for "An Unexpected Journey"
November 19, 2012
"Cloud Atlas": A Multitude of Drops
The Hollywood formula we’ve come to expect depends upon singularity: good guys and bad guys, romantic complications, rising action, a breathtaking climax and clever dénouement. It takes epic films like Cloud Atlas, multistoried events that are fields-long and skyscrapers-high, to help us think differently about the complicated condition in which we all find ourselves. If we’re to get at what the Wachowskis an...
The Devil has All the Best Films
If your walls start bleeding and screaming, call a priest. If you see a man in a hockey mask, run. Divide and conquer—also known as “let’s split up”—is inadvisable. If you wake up in a hospital and the nurse doesn’t answer your buzzes—welcome to the zombie apocalypse. Horror movies have much to teach us: How we portray the inhuman tells us how we perceive the human. Monster stories emerge from dark a...
Moving Images, Violence, and Social Responsibility
"These publications will not cost lives. Who killed people? We are not killing people, I'm sorry. We are not the violent ones. We are just journalists." —Gerard Biard, editor-in-chief of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo "So let's get this straight: In the consensus view of modern American liberalism, it is hilarious to mock Mormons and Mormonism but outrageous to mock Muslims and Islam. Why? Maybe it's because ...
P.T. Anderson's Latest and Our Obsession with "Like"
With a kind of psychological depth that Freud could have only dreamt of, the opening sequence of Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master pulls us into the scarred, dangerous and licentious life of a World War II veteran. Some critics have called Anderson a true auteur of our era, citing The Master as an example. The movie as a whole is not exactly enjoyable, but it is good, possibly great—certainly better than what we...
The Horror of Knowing
The Innkeepers is part classic horror film, part workplace comedy, and part deliberate study of both place and character—which, when taken together, makes the movie a hard sell to a lot of people. And that’s a shame, since I think the movie occupies a unique spot in the cinematic world. Unlike a lot of modern horror films, The Innkeepers invites the audience to be patient and pay attention—good suggestions ...
An Oversimplification of Her Beauty
Combining live action, animation, interviews and formal narration, Terence Nance’s feature film An Oversimplification of Her Beauty is a creative patchwork that delves deep into the emotional life of the main character. Triggered by the seemingly minor event of being stood up, Terence takes the opportunity to reflect and brings us on a journey where self doubt is explored in drawings, clay or papier-mâché, and re...
Cheap Vertigo
Only in the modern day can one hike an Alp in the morning and be home for a late dinner in Boston. (Of course, the time change helps too.) Greetings from Switzerland, which I had the good fortune to visit over the last week thanks to a kinship with the DC-based folk-pop ensemble Eddie From Ohio. The band, whose members often invite me along as utility instrumentalist, was the guest of honor at the U.S. Embassy Ind...
